If Republicans know that extremists are poison in general elections compared to moderates, why do they themselves pick the biggest whackos in the country during their primaries?
This is also a dilemma! And I think the answer is the same as on the Democratic side: The primary process is a problem. It attracts extremists. Second problem is that after such a long era of crazy, there just aren’t many sane Republicans left.
Also, gerrymandering. If your party's candidate is practically guaranteed a win in the general election, there is no reason to even consider whether the squishy middle will vote for the candidate or not.
If we significantly increase the number of Representatives in Congress, which can be done through a vote of both houses and the president, (assuming ending the filibuster) the potential for extreme gerrymandering will be diluted, and it would probably result in an increase in moderate districts. Best of all it would f**k with the electoral college.
Yeah, but gerrymandering is meant to give you as many seats as possible which tends to encourage thin margins of victory, not safe seats. You want to pack the other parties voters into the same district, where they are guarenteed to only get one seat.
The first party which finds a way to tweak its primary rules to put the finger on the scale for candidates which are more electable in general elections will get a serious advantage. It will be good for our democracy too since we will have less of this extremist nonsense.
The purpose of elections is to change policy. Electing another Bush or Romney doesn’t get you immigration enforcement, anti-woke, anti-COVID, or universal school choice.
Your problem is that the policies that a lot of people in your party want are just bad but keeping them in your coalition requires throwing them bones now and again.
Why do I know that if my neighbour wants to lose weight he should stop snacking on junk food, but I still find myself microwaving buttered popcorn at 10 pm when I'm peckish?
Same reason Dems pick weirdos - primaries favor in-group signaling because the people who show up to vote in them are a highly selected subset of the party.
Though there is a lot of brigading on the left as they often have open primaries, which is how the DSA candidates can sneak onto ballots with votes that ordinarily wouldn't be cast were it a closed primary.
I think open primaries help moderates running against DSA candidates by allowing registered independents to participate. The median independent voter is more moderate than the median Democratic voter.
An annoying fact that Democrats just need to deal with is that Republican crazies are more electorally viable than Democratic crazies. It's not fair, but it's just life.
Yeah, well, GOP crazies at least do not insist men with penises must be allowed in women's sports and girls' bathrooms. That, I think, is the extreme crazy that will finally sink the D progressives.
Until people realize (A) you can set rules governing the participation of trans women in sports, usually based on hormone levels, and those requirements can differ based on level (rec league, pro, Olympics, etc.) and (B) trans women go in and out of women's restrooms all the time, and no one notices because it's not the men's locker room at the Y, with old guys walking around nekkid.
Trans women make up less than half of one percent of the US population. Your item (b) is making it sound like there's tens of millions of them doing it all the time, which is simply, flatly, false.
Re: (a), no as there is evidence that the strength, bone density and muscle mass advantages persist despite hormone use.
No they legislate that 10 year old victims of rape and incest give birth to their rape babies and that when a woman is suffering from sepsis due to a non viable fetus, they both die and call that "pro-life". And that birth control is an abortion, so married couples can't plan families. No crazy there. Men in women's sports pales compared to these atrocities.
And yet that is also not the law of the land anywhere even with states being able to decide. Trans in women's sports is the law of the land in some states, and there were backdoor changes made to title IX under Biden that made it the law of the land nationally when it applied as well, so the 2 are not comparable.
That may be true, but I think there are more crazy extremist democrats, they just are not in the wild and are in cities and academia.
No, it is more that the crazy extremist republicans are more about being left alone by the government and in general, so outside of something like not letting their guns being taken away, they don't really impose themselves on the general population, either in politics or as moral busybodies on social media. The extremist democrats are both wanting to impose rules via legislation on a whole lot of things and are also moral busybodies who castigate people on social media and the like and try to bully people into agreeing.
You can even see this in how for people not in the specific areas Trump is targeting (NGOs and academia and government positions), people in general are more annoyed about the 2020 covid left overreach behavior than they are on the current overreach of this government. Yes, from the actual politicians, what is being done now is a lot worse than what the politicians were doing at that time, but when you include that the extreme leftist moral scolds were imposing themselves in the general public in so many ways, from mandatory sensitivity trainings and implicit bias stuff to cancel culture (which while present on the right is just not nearly on the same scale because the right is done from people outside an organization discovering something while the left was done from within an organization, so the scale and paranoia and self censorship was just so much worse).
You can even see this on what the objectives and methods of the culture wars are. On the right, the 2 main things seem to be make the leftists look stupid and also grifting social media for clicks, this makes it so it is something easy to avoid since the clicks can easily be avoided. The leftist culture war goal is to make actual significant changes to society, where they are trying to impose new views and rules on society, many of which people don't want, and due to that they do things that make it much harder to avoid, so the average person who doesn't give a crap at all of this quickly comes to resent the leftists, then likes seeing the social media that best makes fun of those annoying stupid leftist twits who piss them off.
So given these dynamics and how the vast majority of people are not plugged into politics, it is kind of obvious when looking at it this way why the Democratic brand suffers from their insane idiots with the uninformed public>
Now, the more informed but politically ambivalent public (which is very small) also notices that the Democrats have a bigger everything bagel problem where they actually pass bills that throw bones to the leftist fringe, the Republicans do not do that when their fringe is not in power (and Trump really does not align with the traditional Republican fringe, he has some things that actually align with the D's before Clinton that the Democrats moved away from when they became the party of the educated instead of the party of the Working class which started under Obama. It is kind of why Trump was able to win, the whole permanent majority of the D's was based on moving away from their traditional base and towards the R's traditional base, which does in fact create a majority if the R's just moved away from the D's and conceded ground, but it leaves the D's vulnerable to someone, in this case Trump, swooping in and taking the D's traditional base away from them. It also leaves some weird alliances in place, like a lot of unions that are not government unions are made up of people that are the demographics of trumps base and not the D's yet those unions themselves are run by people allied to the D's which makes for weird politics since the D's have not adjusted to this new reality).
I've witnessed this firsthand here in Arizona. It's a slightly Republican leaning state, yet it has two Democratic Senators and a Democratic Governor because the Arizona Republican party's primary electorate consistently prefers wackos like Kari Lake (twice!) and Blake Masters. The Democrats were willing to take advantage, but Republican primary voters did the crucial part. It's extremely disconcerting to see the Democratic party in a number of purple states (e.g., Wisconsin, Michigan) taking a page from their playbook.
I'd love to see every state adopt Alaska's system (i.e., jungle primary, top 4 advance, ranked choice in the general where normies actually show up).
Nah, this doesn't take Republicans in general being all knowing, it just takes a few.
Also, it depends on what, for policy stuff Dems in general are better (although neither are good right now), but for Republicans, goal #1 is to own the libs, and they can see from social media clicks and likes that owning the socialist libs is both more popular and gets more clicks, so they have a feedback mechanism telling them this is the way to go. Leftists are about own the moderate D's and moderate D's are about make things better, the moderate D's arguments are not really something the more extreme D's who want to own the moderates are inclined to listen to, so the incentives perfectly match up with this outcome. It is not about the R's being smarter, it is about the incentives and goals of each side, the extremist DSA types don't actually care about electability, they want to own the Moderate D's and don't care as much about the ultimate winner having a D instead of an R, so of course they don't pay any attention about electability in the general election since that is not their goal.
B/c primaries allow both parties to select the most extreme candidates, the MAGA flag monster truck dude and someone like Hong are two sides of the same coin psychologically. They thrive on personal outrage. Adolf Hitler infamously said he could easily convert a commie to Nazism much easier than he could a “normie”. Why? Because the underlying psychological makeup was the same.
Entirely possible that the median American voter hates far-left politics more than they do crazy Republicans.
Alternate hypothesis: the extreme far-right is so aggressively stigmatised that as crazy as the Republican candidates we get are, they still aren't as crazy (ideologically speaking) as their far-left Democrat opposites.
Nah, far right crazies usually want to be left alone by people, so they don't impose themselves on others in social situations and in general life. Far left crazies are moral busybodies imposing themselves on everything and making everything political, so piss off the apolitical normies who just wanted to watch a sports game and not get bombarded with annoying politics they don't care about, or have implicit bias training or any of that BS.
Only thing the far right crazies have really imposed themselves on people in a big way is about guns, they want to keep their guns and make sure that no limits on that are made. There was concern about them also limiting abortion access after the scrapping of Roe v. Wade, except that did not come to pass, and the far left decriminalizing things which include illegal guns hurts their ability to deal with the gun issue since dealing with guns in cities also means punishing the people with illegal guns as a part of it, so they can't really get a win there.
Yes it has, it has happened numerous times, they just say things like communism has never been done right and refused to learn even though most of the academics in the major communist revolutions (or other clearly leftist revolutions like the French Revolution) end up dead not all that long afterwards.
There have been stoves so hot that they melted, the issue is that part of leftism includes refusing to learn from history so it just takes people growing up with no experience with it themselves for that nonsense to start up again.
Bold of you to assume that “winning elections to effect policy change” is what’s driving DSA voters. It’s power and status within the organization (The Democratic Party) that they crave.
They’d be happy to lose every election for a decade as long as they get to hold the purse strings and the megaphone.
Yes, I've been saying for a while now that Mamdani and El-Sayed and DAC aren't really running for their offices as much as they are running for recognition among the DSA as to who is The Most DSA.
The Democrats are great at raising money and spending it on consultants and ad companies that have no clue what they’re doing. It feels like a racket to me — send a bunch of texts to raise money so they can send more texts asking for money.
It is a racket, Kamala's campaign raised like $1 Billion and yet pretty much none of that actually reached the campaign itself to be used as the 3rd party PACs they hired to do stuff ended up claiming most of the money via fees from various shell consulting payments to related NGOs and passed on only a small amount of the money to the campaign. It was why they had trouble funding basic things compared to Trump's campaign despite outraising them so much. It made her also look really incompetence in so many ways that hurt her, and things like this plague the D's in general in state governance which hurts them in national elections because the biggest most prominent red states are just being ran better in general than the biggest most prominent blue states.
The problem with hot-stove touching, as Mark Twain said about cats sitting on one . . . not only will they never sit on a hot stove again, they will not sit on a cold one either. The correct lesson may not have been learned.
Marxism never fails, it can only be failed. They will lose, and claim their candidates weren’t pure enough. After all, few have actively liquidated kulaks.
At this point the child’s arms have been amputated from repeated extensive fourth-degree burns, and the child is pressing its face against the stove instead.
That tweet about Thanksgiving. Good night, lady, if someone challenged you to pack as many 2020 progressive cliches into 280 characters as possible, you didn't have to take them up on it, and you certainly didn't need to post it in public. That's the kind of thing you post on the internal group chat.
(I think the "folx and women" is the best part. Very "World Ends: Marginalized Gender Identities Hardest Hit.)
The whole "folks" and "folx" stuff from a certain brand of leftist is just weird. Nobody talks like this unless they're in super-specific activist circles. Nobody is asking them to do this.
I connect it to the affectation of people who suddenly started appending "y'all" to every utterance, presumably to achieve a certain unearned folksy charm. (Or perhaps "folxy" charm.)
I have no complaint with "y'all" as a second-person plural pronoun, in fact it seems pretty useful. But one does take notice when overnight every college-educated Progressive Northerner I know starts sprinkling it into every Instagram post.
Yeah, I’m a Midwesterner and at first it felt really cringe. I was also very sensitive to cultural appropriation, so I was really careful to never do it around my friend from Texas. I still use it sometimes, especially around folks who prefer it (oddly mostly New Englanders). But it’s such a relief to not have to worry anymore about getting side glances if I accidentally let a “you guys” slip out.
It's kind of nice that leftists seem to be embracing the popular perception that they are joyless humourless buzzkills who seem morally opposed to anything and everything the least bit fun or entertaining or popular.
I mean, it's not going to help anyone including them in the slightest, but, you know, points for honesty.
But look at all the world's funniest people. Dave Chappelle doesn't follow any sort of orthodoxy, but he's still somewhere to the "left." Chris Rock, too. The people who do South Park are basically libertarian.
Jon Stewart? Jimmy Kimmel? Most of the SNL writers and cast?
The right counters with ... Gutfeld? That's about it. Joe Rogan is neither left nor right, though he's clearly ill at ease with right-wing policies on immigration, among other things. He got suckered by Trump when the "leftists" made him feel bad for spouting junk science -- which you could *maybe* say is an example of why people don't like leftists, but honestly, people who spout junk science *should* feel bad.
I'm not sure I'd describe any of those names you list as 'leftists', though.
People whose politics might *lean* left, sure. But 'leftists'? Nah. Sure, they might rag on Trump (but, then, he's practically the textbook definition of 'an easy target'), but if you scratch the surface they're all pretty center-left through and through at furthest.
Jimmy Kimmel became less funny the more he became political though, so he is not a good example, and outside of John Stewart, all of those were funny when they made fun of anything absurd and not really being political. Rogan is mostly apolitical as well, so there really are not that many politically funny people. Yes, a lot of the comedians who are good are Ds personally, but they are funny because their jokes take them everywhere.
> In the early days of 2015, Hillary Clinton’s aides sat down to map out a battle plan targeting her inevitable Republican opponent. Though the field on the right was saturated, Clinton’s strategists saw this as a boon: “The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right,” they wrote in a memo to the Democratic National Committee. “In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. . . . We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are the leaders of the pack.” By highlighting the outliers, they hoped to take advantage of the deep schism between the far-right and centrist factions of the G.O.P., ultimately producing a candidate so extreme as to be unpalatable to the general electorate. Topping the list of “Pied Piper” candidates was Donald Trump—the ultimate outlier, but one that Clinton—like the Russians—hoped could be a useful idiot.
So y'know, Republicans? Great plan. Definitely won't blow up in your face to run this plan while your flagbearer is 20 points underwater.
Not really an issue for R's, since the issue there by Hilary was forgetting that Trump used to be a D back before the D's started shifting the base of people they were trying to speak to the most, so Trump was actually positioned to undercut the D's support with the working class. None of these far leftists are actually positioned to do something like that since they are the most disliked people possible among the main current R base. Heck, hatred of these lefties was the favored R tactic for eating into the working class support for the Ds back when that was the base of the Ds, because these smug busybody collectivist assholes really piss off people who work with their hands for a living and like to own their tools and crops.
My random and disjointed thoughts: 1) the DSA platform is politically gamma-level radioactive; 2) calling balls and strikes here: prominent Muslim DSA or DSA adjacent politicians give MAGA grist at the national level at the worst possible moment: 3) the “Democratic Establishment” has been pathetic and ineffective at stopping tangibly pestilential MAGA/Trump: 4) I find some (not most) farther left politicians to be pretty damn galvanizing. You underestimate AOC at your peril. I could go but I think you get the picture. And apart from one overriding thought, I’m very confused and that thought is this: a cohesive united Front is vital in stopping Trump and MAGA.
I think there are differences in quality of candidate within the DSA. Mamdani and AOC* strike me as more successful candidates because they are charismatic and pragmatic enough to overcome their ideological flaws. (Also, most progressive guys are absolutely horny for AOC, so that helps).
I think the question is whether the DSA left can be popular in a real swing election, and I'll believe it when I see it. Mamdani won a deep blue city running against an unpopular sex pest. AOC has yet to win an election outside of Brooklyn, and even her next goal (NY Senate) would be a safe blue seat. The presidency runs through Wisconsin, not Williamsburg.
(*ironically, you can't even really call AOC DSA anymore, as she's broken off from that group by....well, trying to be more electable)
There’s no daylight between us, Mike. I especially agree with you about Mamdani and AOC each having unique gifts as politicians including the ability to be flexible (to a point). I wouldn’t be surprised if El-Sayed, who was never an DSA member, proves himself equally talented. We’ll see. Having said that, there are some serious loons coming out of the DSA stable.
Muslims clearly using leftists political parties in Europe for their own ends until they get enough of a population to vote in their own Muslim people in office does not help the case for Muslims being good actors with the general public. Throw in the Somali's in MN (another example of them taking advantage of leftist largess) and the really not being good examples of Muslims en mass policing their own to stop the bad behavior and they are kind of toxic with the general public who has basic pattern matching, something that the leftists don't have and call people who notice these patterns Islamophobes. I am not saying all Muslims are like this, they are not, but on larger scale, there are clearly cultural issues that are present and are not being fixed at all internally, so unless something is done externally to fix those issues (something that the leftists are also against) then people just don't want more muslims and muslim influence on the country.
What's the point of being a bartender if you're anti-fun? Why is every answer she gives to every question just like 15 percent weirder than it needs to be?
She’s gained some traction with rural voters concerned about data centers. Tiffany would not be good at all for the state. He’ll put a strip mall in a state park lol
Exactly. No one lives in a bucolic rural area in order to listen to the unrelenting hum of a data center nearby generating Simpsons porn for 14-year-olds in Florida all day.
Ah, but Hong will rid us of the scourge that is Halloween, saving me from having to pretend to be out of the house on October 31st so I don't have to hand out sweets to the scruffy neighbourhood kids!
Unfortunately, ALL Democrats in office are deluded fuckwits, not just the DSA crowd.
To wit: EVERY Democrat in Congress, both House and Senate, is a CO-SPONSOR of a bill (the so-called "Equality Act") to make gender self-ID instantaneous and unquestionable nationwide.
Looking forward to seeing my girls Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White tear up the WNBA!
All true, except the Democratic Party, which controls its own elections, lets DSA candidates run in its primaries, and the Democratic Party establishment has for years let its rich-kid socialist staffers dictate its slogans, its kneeling in Congress with a raised fist, and its deeply hated progressive policies. The latest iteration was allegedly moderate Biden letting progressives run his show, even before he went full senile. Biden violated Title IX on his first day in office by executive order. Student loan cancellation? The inflation reduction act?
The Democratic Party (hardly just DSA members) is talking about Jooz Money Running The US like Henry Ford, and its voting on Israel makes it clear that Anzi Jew-hate is their one and only big tent idea. When every moderate ends up being captured by their progressive staffers, that’s not a moderate party.
Hong and her hard leftists are just more "into it" than the rest of you. She's found a way to bag the slog of the restaurant business, find her inner theatre kid, and make money (eventually). She honestly hates us, so there's clarity there.
There's a few problems here. A big one, as noted today, is that "far" left candidates historically don't win general elections. Fair point, I get it. But another problem needs to be confronted also. Namely, the goddamn "moderates" have done fuck-all when it comes to challenging the reckless, civilization destroying habits of the Trumb administrations I + II. Which to my mind comes down to one simple concept: the all-consuming power of unrestrained wealth, and the havoc it wreaks on civil society. So what's a frustrated prole to do? Well, there's actually an answer to that. Organize. The first step of which is to gather forces, which requires making noise and raising alarms. So there you go, you've been warned!
I might join a movement against the all-consuming power of unrestrained wealth. But not one that also hates me for being white, or expects me to deny the reality of biological sex, or that continually makes excuses for jihadi terrorists. The DSA types seem to think they can "organize" their way out of having to adjust these positions. I guess we'll see if that's true.
It's a problem when the country is dismantling women's freedoms one by one and trying to bring back a utopia that never existed by brute force, and the extremists of your party have people obsessed about a war in the middle east and dismantling Title IX protections to "protect" a subset of men. I feel like somehow republicans must have a hand in this because it makes no sense.
It is the poisonous fruit of 60's/70's radicalism and Soviet-backed "anti-imperialism" that has been consolidating power within western institutions (especially academia) for decades. What changed is that the mainstream / moderate Dems have run out of steam and can't keep the radicals out anymore. Deliberate social media shit-stirring by America's adversaries is probably a factor as well.
There is no real love for transsexuals, we are just another group whose alienation can be leveraged to take down the West. Hence why so few activists are interested in a durable compromise that would protect everyone's rights within a liberal framework, and why they continue to push the most marginal and unpopular parts of the agenda (sports, youth transition). The backlash is part of the point. If it imperils gay marriage then so much the better, there is another large group of people who were "lost" to the radicals when they were given the chance to settle down and have a normal life.
Which current President of the United States visited the USSR (when it was still the USSR) in the late 1980s? And shortly after that visit paid for a full-page ad in major newspapers attacking NATO and US allies and calling for the US to end its foreign alliances, in language matching the Soviet Communist propaganda line of the time? YOU GET ONE GUESS.
How exactly are the D's suppose to prevent the executive orders of trump besides lawsuits, which they have been doing? Like, they are not letting any legislation get thru that supports trumps recklessness and are preventing political appointments being ratified by congress, so there is not another avenue for them to oppose him besides win the next elections.
Deciding to stop trump via making even more egregious breaks in rules and laws than what Trump is doing may satisfy your tribal instincts and will make things worse, and doing anything more than what they are doing that is not breaking rules and laws would just be performative nonsense that has no affect. I guess you want more of that?
Part of the problem is that the Democrats haven't controlled both houses of Congress at any point that Trump has been in power and only held the House from 2018-2020. You could have an all-DSA caucus, and the result probably doesn't change. That said, I agree that part of the reason the Dems are at this inflection point is that their party has been so aimless and feeble that it's basically enabled a takeover.
If Republicans know that extremists are poison in general elections compared to moderates, why do they themselves pick the biggest whackos in the country during their primaries?
This is also a dilemma! And I think the answer is the same as on the Democratic side: The primary process is a problem. It attracts extremists. Second problem is that after such a long era of crazy, there just aren’t many sane Republicans left.
Also, gerrymandering. If your party's candidate is practically guaranteed a win in the general election, there is no reason to even consider whether the squishy middle will vote for the candidate or not.
If we significantly increase the number of Representatives in Congress, which can be done through a vote of both houses and the president, (assuming ending the filibuster) the potential for extreme gerrymandering will be diluted, and it would probably result in an increase in moderate districts. Best of all it would f**k with the electoral college.
That's a pretty good idea. I like it. Makes gaming the system harder. Same if there were more smaller states.
Or two more states! Puerto Rico and Washington DC come to mind.
Yeah, but gerrymandering is meant to give you as many seats as possible which tends to encourage thin margins of victory, not safe seats. You want to pack the other parties voters into the same district, where they are guarenteed to only get one seat.
Yeah, not sure how easy that would be. It might result in more districts with a majority of moderate Democrats, say in the suburbs.
It's possible to overplay your hand yeah.
The first party which finds a way to tweak its primary rules to put the finger on the scale for candidates which are more electable in general elections will get a serious advantage. It will be good for our democracy too since we will have less of this extremist nonsense.
Virginia Republicans used ranked-choice voting to pick Glenn Youngkin, who was palatable enough to get elected governor.
Until about 50 years ago we didn't even have primaries. Parties just pulled into them because they "look democratic."
Open primaries help. Or allowing independents but not people from the opposing party.
The purpose of elections is to change policy. Electing another Bush or Romney doesn’t get you immigration enforcement, anti-woke, anti-COVID, or universal school choice.
Your problem is that the policies that a lot of people in your party want are just bad but keeping them in your coalition requires throwing them bones now and again.
Why do I know that if my neighbour wants to lose weight he should stop snacking on junk food, but I still find myself microwaving buttered popcorn at 10 pm when I'm peckish?
Same reason Dems pick weirdos - primaries favor in-group signaling because the people who show up to vote in them are a highly selected subset of the party.
Though there is a lot of brigading on the left as they often have open primaries, which is how the DSA candidates can sneak onto ballots with votes that ordinarily wouldn't be cast were it a closed primary.
I think open primaries help moderates running against DSA candidates by allowing registered independents to participate. The median independent voter is more moderate than the median Democratic voter.
An annoying fact that Democrats just need to deal with is that Republican crazies are more electorally viable than Democratic crazies. It's not fair, but it's just life.
They're are more crazy extremist republicans in the wild than crazy extremist democrats, for better or for worse.
I need a score card to keep up with what constitutes 'crazy extremists' anymore in the GOP.
Yeah, well, GOP crazies at least do not insist men with penises must be allowed in women's sports and girls' bathrooms. That, I think, is the extreme crazy that will finally sink the D progressives.
Until people realize (A) you can set rules governing the participation of trans women in sports, usually based on hormone levels, and those requirements can differ based on level (rec league, pro, Olympics, etc.) and (B) trans women go in and out of women's restrooms all the time, and no one notices because it's not the men's locker room at the Y, with old guys walking around nekkid.
Did your vast experience in women's sports and locker rooms tell you that Beau?
Trans women make up less than half of one percent of the US population. Your item (b) is making it sound like there's tens of millions of them doing it all the time, which is simply, flatly, false.
Re: (a), no as there is evidence that the strength, bone density and muscle mass advantages persist despite hormone use.
No they legislate that 10 year old victims of rape and incest give birth to their rape babies and that when a woman is suffering from sepsis due to a non viable fetus, they both die and call that "pro-life". And that birth control is an abortion, so married couples can't plan families. No crazy there. Men in women's sports pales compared to these atrocities.
And yet that is also not the law of the land anywhere even with states being able to decide. Trans in women's sports is the law of the land in some states, and there were backdoor changes made to title IX under Biden that made it the law of the land nationally when it applied as well, so the 2 are not comparable.
That isn’t what any laws demand, of course.
Yeah I meant that as some hold up basic normie views around immigration and trans topics as 'right wing extremism'.
That would be cabinet members (RFK Jr, etc.)
That may be true, but I think there are more crazy extremist democrats, they just are not in the wild and are in cities and academia.
No, it is more that the crazy extremist republicans are more about being left alone by the government and in general, so outside of something like not letting their guns being taken away, they don't really impose themselves on the general population, either in politics or as moral busybodies on social media. The extremist democrats are both wanting to impose rules via legislation on a whole lot of things and are also moral busybodies who castigate people on social media and the like and try to bully people into agreeing.
You can even see this in how for people not in the specific areas Trump is targeting (NGOs and academia and government positions), people in general are more annoyed about the 2020 covid left overreach behavior than they are on the current overreach of this government. Yes, from the actual politicians, what is being done now is a lot worse than what the politicians were doing at that time, but when you include that the extreme leftist moral scolds were imposing themselves in the general public in so many ways, from mandatory sensitivity trainings and implicit bias stuff to cancel culture (which while present on the right is just not nearly on the same scale because the right is done from people outside an organization discovering something while the left was done from within an organization, so the scale and paranoia and self censorship was just so much worse).
You can even see this on what the objectives and methods of the culture wars are. On the right, the 2 main things seem to be make the leftists look stupid and also grifting social media for clicks, this makes it so it is something easy to avoid since the clicks can easily be avoided. The leftist culture war goal is to make actual significant changes to society, where they are trying to impose new views and rules on society, many of which people don't want, and due to that they do things that make it much harder to avoid, so the average person who doesn't give a crap at all of this quickly comes to resent the leftists, then likes seeing the social media that best makes fun of those annoying stupid leftist twits who piss them off.
So given these dynamics and how the vast majority of people are not plugged into politics, it is kind of obvious when looking at it this way why the Democratic brand suffers from their insane idiots with the uninformed public>
Now, the more informed but politically ambivalent public (which is very small) also notices that the Democrats have a bigger everything bagel problem where they actually pass bills that throw bones to the leftist fringe, the Republicans do not do that when their fringe is not in power (and Trump really does not align with the traditional Republican fringe, he has some things that actually align with the D's before Clinton that the Democrats moved away from when they became the party of the educated instead of the party of the Working class which started under Obama. It is kind of why Trump was able to win, the whole permanent majority of the D's was based on moving away from their traditional base and towards the R's traditional base, which does in fact create a majority if the R's just moved away from the D's and conceded ground, but it leaves the D's vulnerable to someone, in this case Trump, swooping in and taking the D's traditional base away from them. It also leaves some weird alliances in place, like a lot of unions that are not government unions are made up of people that are the demographics of trumps base and not the D's yet those unions themselves are run by people allied to the D's which makes for weird politics since the D's have not adjusted to this new reality).
Some of those people famously lost in humiliating fashion!
"I'm not a witch!"
I miss her 😔
I've witnessed this firsthand here in Arizona. It's a slightly Republican leaning state, yet it has two Democratic Senators and a Democratic Governor because the Arizona Republican party's primary electorate consistently prefers wackos like Kari Lake (twice!) and Blake Masters. The Democrats were willing to take advantage, but Republican primary voters did the crucial part. It's extremely disconcerting to see the Democratic party in a number of purple states (e.g., Wisconsin, Michigan) taking a page from their playbook.
I'd love to see every state adopt Alaska's system (i.e., jungle primary, top 4 advance, ranked choice in the general where normies actually show up).
Well, it’s worked for them a lot more than it has for leftists.
There goes Maurer’s brilliant theory that Republican operatives are all-knowing geniuses (which he believes precisely this one time).
Nah, this doesn't take Republicans in general being all knowing, it just takes a few.
Also, it depends on what, for policy stuff Dems in general are better (although neither are good right now), but for Republicans, goal #1 is to own the libs, and they can see from social media clicks and likes that owning the socialist libs is both more popular and gets more clicks, so they have a feedback mechanism telling them this is the way to go. Leftists are about own the moderate D's and moderate D's are about make things better, the moderate D's arguments are not really something the more extreme D's who want to own the moderates are inclined to listen to, so the incentives perfectly match up with this outcome. It is not about the R's being smarter, it is about the incentives and goals of each side, the extremist DSA types don't actually care about electability, they want to own the Moderate D's and don't care as much about the ultimate winner having a D instead of an R, so of course they don't pay any attention about electability in the general election since that is not their goal.
You might well be wrong. Everything about this, including your take, is so profoundly anti democratic it could have been written by Stephen Miller
B/c primaries allow both parties to select the most extreme candidates, the MAGA flag monster truck dude and someone like Hong are two sides of the same coin psychologically. They thrive on personal outrage. Adolf Hitler infamously said he could easily convert a commie to Nazism much easier than he could a “normie”. Why? Because the underlying psychological makeup was the same.
Entirely possible that the median American voter hates far-left politics more than they do crazy Republicans.
Alternate hypothesis: the extreme far-right is so aggressively stigmatised that as crazy as the Republican candidates we get are, they still aren't as crazy (ideologically speaking) as their far-left Democrat opposites.
Nah, far right crazies usually want to be left alone by people, so they don't impose themselves on others in social situations and in general life. Far left crazies are moral busybodies imposing themselves on everything and making everything political, so piss off the apolitical normies who just wanted to watch a sports game and not get bombarded with annoying politics they don't care about, or have implicit bias training or any of that BS.
Only thing the far right crazies have really imposed themselves on people in a big way is about guns, they want to keep their guns and make sure that no limits on that are made. There was concern about them also limiting abortion access after the scrapping of Roe v. Wade, except that did not come to pass, and the far left decriminalizing things which include illegal guns hurts their ability to deal with the gun issue since dealing with guns in cities also means punishing the people with illegal guns as a part of it, so they can't really get a win there.
Sometimes you have to let the child touch the hot stove so the lesson will sink in.....
Though I worry we might have “kids” (leftists) who will touch the hot stove and then keep right on touching it. This is an evidence-averse crowd.
A real hot stove has never been tried
The workers and peasants have melted down their stoves to make steel to make stoves.
GuyInPlace: Not Mao's best idea.....
Yes it has, it has happened numerous times, they just say things like communism has never been done right and refused to learn even though most of the academics in the major communist revolutions (or other clearly leftist revolutions like the French Revolution) end up dead not all that long afterwards.
There have been stoves so hot that they melted, the issue is that part of leftism includes refusing to learn from history so it just takes people growing up with no experience with it themselves for that nonsense to start up again.
perfection
Bold of you to assume that “winning elections to effect policy change” is what’s driving DSA voters. It’s power and status within the organization (The Democratic Party) that they crave.
They’d be happy to lose every election for a decade as long as they get to hold the purse strings and the megaphone.
Yes, I've been saying for a while now that Mamdani and El-Sayed and DAC aren't really running for their offices as much as they are running for recognition among the DSA as to who is The Most DSA.
How will they hold the purse strings? Even Congress doesn't have the purse strings any more.
Sorry, I meant to imply a silent “… of the Democratic Party and its Orgs” there.
Thanks for clarifying - that makes sense.
The Democrats are great at raising money and spending it on consultants and ad companies that have no clue what they’re doing. It feels like a racket to me — send a bunch of texts to raise money so they can send more texts asking for money.
It is a racket, Kamala's campaign raised like $1 Billion and yet pretty much none of that actually reached the campaign itself to be used as the 3rd party PACs they hired to do stuff ended up claiming most of the money via fees from various shell consulting payments to related NGOs and passed on only a small amount of the money to the campaign. It was why they had trouble funding basic things compared to Trump's campaign despite outraising them so much. It made her also look really incompetence in so many ways that hurt her, and things like this plague the D's in general in state governance which hurts them in national elections because the biggest most prominent red states are just being ran better in general than the biggest most prominent blue states.
The problem with hot-stove touching, as Mark Twain said about cats sitting on one . . . not only will they never sit on a hot stove again, they will not sit on a cold one either. The correct lesson may not have been learned.
Marxism never fails, it can only be failed. They will lose, and claim their candidates weren’t pure enough. After all, few have actively liquidated kulaks.
At this point the child’s arms have been amputated from repeated extensive fourth-degree burns, and the child is pressing its face against the stove instead.
Maybe THIS time?? Oops all famine, darn it again!
That tweet about Thanksgiving. Good night, lady, if someone challenged you to pack as many 2020 progressive cliches into 280 characters as possible, you didn't have to take them up on it, and you certainly didn't need to post it in public. That's the kind of thing you post on the internal group chat.
(I think the "folx and women" is the best part. Very "World Ends: Marginalized Gender Identities Hardest Hit.)
The whole "folks" and "folx" stuff from a certain brand of leftist is just weird. Nobody talks like this unless they're in super-specific activist circles. Nobody is asking them to do this.
It's also annoying for those of us who used the word "folks" before the activists appropriated it.
I wonder if the Bush "Group of folks" line about al-Qaida was so weird it just opened up the word to be taken over by any weirdness.
I connect it to the affectation of people who suddenly started appending "y'all" to every utterance, presumably to achieve a certain unearned folksy charm. (Or perhaps "folxy" charm.)
In my circles “y’all” was meant to replace “you guys”. For a while there it was mandatory.
I have no complaint with "y'all" as a second-person plural pronoun, in fact it seems pretty useful. But one does take notice when overnight every college-educated Progressive Northerner I know starts sprinkling it into every Instagram post.
Yeah, I’m a Midwesterner and at first it felt really cringe. I was also very sensitive to cultural appropriation, so I was really careful to never do it around my friend from Texas. I still use it sometimes, especially around folks who prefer it (oddly mostly New Englanders). But it’s such a relief to not have to worry anymore about getting side glances if I accidentally let a “you guys” slip out.
Yeah, and it was really easy to tell when that was what it was, because there was a stilted vibe to it.
It's kind of nice that leftists seem to be embracing the popular perception that they are joyless humourless buzzkills who seem morally opposed to anything and everything the least bit fun or entertaining or popular.
I mean, it's not going to help anyone including them in the slightest, but, you know, points for honesty.
I don't know -- Mamdani seems like a fun guy. AOC seems fun. Bernie appreciated Larry David's impression of him.
Yes, Bernie liked fun so much he was asked to leave the commune he joined.
I mean -- to an extent, I get it.
But look at all the world's funniest people. Dave Chappelle doesn't follow any sort of orthodoxy, but he's still somewhere to the "left." Chris Rock, too. The people who do South Park are basically libertarian.
Jon Stewart? Jimmy Kimmel? Most of the SNL writers and cast?
The right counters with ... Gutfeld? That's about it. Joe Rogan is neither left nor right, though he's clearly ill at ease with right-wing policies on immigration, among other things. He got suckered by Trump when the "leftists" made him feel bad for spouting junk science -- which you could *maybe* say is an example of why people don't like leftists, but honestly, people who spout junk science *should* feel bad.
I'm not sure I'd describe any of those names you list as 'leftists', though.
People whose politics might *lean* left, sure. But 'leftists'? Nah. Sure, they might rag on Trump (but, then, he's practically the textbook definition of 'an easy target'), but if you scratch the surface they're all pretty center-left through and through at furthest.
Yeah -- I'm starting to think you have a point. It's certainly an image problem at the very least.
Jimmy Kimmel became less funny the more he became political though, so he is not a good example, and outside of John Stewart, all of those were funny when they made fun of anything absurd and not really being political. Rogan is mostly apolitical as well, so there really are not that many politically funny people. Yes, a lot of the comedians who are good are Ds personally, but they are funny because their jokes take them everywhere.
Sure, but I think the point here was less about whether leftists’ political humor is funny and more about whether they’re humorless bores.
It was just a quip on Francesca Hong seemingly going out of her way to publicly oppose anything that seems remotely enjoyable, to be fair.
Though that raises the question: are they truly fun, or are they merely better at giving the impression that they're fun than her?
Hold on. This one is actually a rerun of an episode we've already seen!
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/2020-democratic-presidential-candidates-opposition
> In the early days of 2015, Hillary Clinton’s aides sat down to map out a battle plan targeting her inevitable Republican opponent. Though the field on the right was saturated, Clinton’s strategists saw this as a boon: “The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right,” they wrote in a memo to the Democratic National Committee. “In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. . . . We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are the leaders of the pack.” By highlighting the outliers, they hoped to take advantage of the deep schism between the far-right and centrist factions of the G.O.P., ultimately producing a candidate so extreme as to be unpalatable to the general electorate. Topping the list of “Pied Piper” candidates was Donald Trump—the ultimate outlier, but one that Clinton—like the Russians—hoped could be a useful idiot.
So y'know, Republicans? Great plan. Definitely won't blow up in your face to run this plan while your flagbearer is 20 points underwater.
Not really an issue for R's, since the issue there by Hilary was forgetting that Trump used to be a D back before the D's started shifting the base of people they were trying to speak to the most, so Trump was actually positioned to undercut the D's support with the working class. None of these far leftists are actually positioned to do something like that since they are the most disliked people possible among the main current R base. Heck, hatred of these lefties was the favored R tactic for eating into the working class support for the Ds back when that was the base of the Ds, because these smug busybody collectivist assholes really piss off people who work with their hands for a living and like to own their tools and crops.
Maybe we should just get rid of primaries and have everyone run in a general election with ranked choice voting. Maybe we'd get saner results?
THANK you!
My random and disjointed thoughts: 1) the DSA platform is politically gamma-level radioactive; 2) calling balls and strikes here: prominent Muslim DSA or DSA adjacent politicians give MAGA grist at the national level at the worst possible moment: 3) the “Democratic Establishment” has been pathetic and ineffective at stopping tangibly pestilential MAGA/Trump: 4) I find some (not most) farther left politicians to be pretty damn galvanizing. You underestimate AOC at your peril. I could go but I think you get the picture. And apart from one overriding thought, I’m very confused and that thought is this: a cohesive united Front is vital in stopping Trump and MAGA.
I think there are differences in quality of candidate within the DSA. Mamdani and AOC* strike me as more successful candidates because they are charismatic and pragmatic enough to overcome their ideological flaws. (Also, most progressive guys are absolutely horny for AOC, so that helps).
I think the question is whether the DSA left can be popular in a real swing election, and I'll believe it when I see it. Mamdani won a deep blue city running against an unpopular sex pest. AOC has yet to win an election outside of Brooklyn, and even her next goal (NY Senate) would be a safe blue seat. The presidency runs through Wisconsin, not Williamsburg.
(*ironically, you can't even really call AOC DSA anymore, as she's broken off from that group by....well, trying to be more electable)
There’s no daylight between us, Mike. I especially agree with you about Mamdani and AOC each having unique gifts as politicians including the ability to be flexible (to a point). I wouldn’t be surprised if El-Sayed, who was never an DSA member, proves himself equally talented. We’ll see. Having said that, there are some serious loons coming out of the DSA stable.
Muslims clearly using leftists political parties in Europe for their own ends until they get enough of a population to vote in their own Muslim people in office does not help the case for Muslims being good actors with the general public. Throw in the Somali's in MN (another example of them taking advantage of leftist largess) and the really not being good examples of Muslims en mass policing their own to stop the bad behavior and they are kind of toxic with the general public who has basic pattern matching, something that the leftists don't have and call people who notice these patterns Islamophobes. I am not saying all Muslims are like this, they are not, but on larger scale, there are clearly cultural issues that are present and are not being fixed at all internally, so unless something is done externally to fix those issues (something that the leftists are also against) then people just don't want more muslims and muslim influence on the country.
What's the point of being a bartender if you're anti-fun? Why is every answer she gives to every question just like 15 percent weirder than it needs to be?
Her restaurant failed — maybe we know why!
Hong plays well in Madison. Not so sure about Manitowoc though.
To say nothing of Oconomowoc!
Fun fact: Manitowoc has a lovely maritime museum and an annual festival celebrating when a piece of Sputnik landed there
She’s gained some traction with rural voters concerned about data centers. Tiffany would not be good at all for the state. He’ll put a strip mall in a state park lol
Not surprising - WI has a Progressive farmer movement history so some rural support is to be expected.
I think the sound of data centers being nearby is horrendous. I couldn’t imagine listening to that in the area.
Exactly. No one lives in a bucolic rural area in order to listen to the unrelenting hum of a data center nearby generating Simpsons porn for 14-year-olds in Florida all day.
"“See the moon, up in the sky? Do you want the moon, Mary?
Cause if you tip , I'll shove it up my ass.”
-Jimmy Stewart on OnlyFans
I hate you
It helps if you assume I'm really nailing the impression.😁
Ah, but Hong will rid us of the scourge that is Halloween, saving me from having to pretend to be out of the house on October 31st so I don't have to hand out sweets to the scruffy neighbourhood kids!
Unfortunately, ALL Democrats in office are deluded fuckwits, not just the DSA crowd.
To wit: EVERY Democrat in Congress, both House and Senate, is a CO-SPONSOR of a bill (the so-called "Equality Act") to make gender self-ID instantaneous and unquestionable nationwide.
Looking forward to seeing my girls Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White tear up the WNBA!
https://nypost.com/2026/08/08/sports/ex-nba-player-royce-white-to-declare-for-wnba-draft-as-transgender/
Enjoy the coming Democratic trifecta!
All true, except the Democratic Party, which controls its own elections, lets DSA candidates run in its primaries, and the Democratic Party establishment has for years let its rich-kid socialist staffers dictate its slogans, its kneeling in Congress with a raised fist, and its deeply hated progressive policies. The latest iteration was allegedly moderate Biden letting progressives run his show, even before he went full senile. Biden violated Title IX on his first day in office by executive order. Student loan cancellation? The inflation reduction act?
The Democratic Party (hardly just DSA members) is talking about Jooz Money Running The US like Henry Ford, and its voting on Israel makes it clear that Anzi Jew-hate is their one and only big tent idea. When every moderate ends up being captured by their progressive staffers, that’s not a moderate party.
Hong and her hard leftists are just more "into it" than the rest of you. She's found a way to bag the slog of the restaurant business, find her inner theatre kid, and make money (eventually). She honestly hates us, so there's clarity there.
There's a few problems here. A big one, as noted today, is that "far" left candidates historically don't win general elections. Fair point, I get it. But another problem needs to be confronted also. Namely, the goddamn "moderates" have done fuck-all when it comes to challenging the reckless, civilization destroying habits of the Trumb administrations I + II. Which to my mind comes down to one simple concept: the all-consuming power of unrestrained wealth, and the havoc it wreaks on civil society. So what's a frustrated prole to do? Well, there's actually an answer to that. Organize. The first step of which is to gather forces, which requires making noise and raising alarms. So there you go, you've been warned!
I might join a movement against the all-consuming power of unrestrained wealth. But not one that also hates me for being white, or expects me to deny the reality of biological sex, or that continually makes excuses for jihadi terrorists. The DSA types seem to think they can "organize" their way out of having to adjust these positions. I guess we'll see if that's true.
It's a problem when the country is dismantling women's freedoms one by one and trying to bring back a utopia that never existed by brute force, and the extremists of your party have people obsessed about a war in the middle east and dismantling Title IX protections to "protect" a subset of men. I feel like somehow republicans must have a hand in this because it makes no sense.
It is the poisonous fruit of 60's/70's radicalism and Soviet-backed "anti-imperialism" that has been consolidating power within western institutions (especially academia) for decades. What changed is that the mainstream / moderate Dems have run out of steam and can't keep the radicals out anymore. Deliberate social media shit-stirring by America's adversaries is probably a factor as well.
There is no real love for transsexuals, we are just another group whose alienation can be leveraged to take down the West. Hence why so few activists are interested in a durable compromise that would protect everyone's rights within a liberal framework, and why they continue to push the most marginal and unpopular parts of the agenda (sports, youth transition). The backlash is part of the point. If it imperils gay marriage then so much the better, there is another large group of people who were "lost" to the radicals when they were given the chance to settle down and have a normal life.
Which current President of the United States visited the USSR (when it was still the USSR) in the late 1980s? And shortly after that visit paid for a full-page ad in major newspapers attacking NATO and US allies and calling for the US to end its foreign alliances, in language matching the Soviet Communist propaganda line of the time? YOU GET ONE GUESS.
How exactly are the D's suppose to prevent the executive orders of trump besides lawsuits, which they have been doing? Like, they are not letting any legislation get thru that supports trumps recklessness and are preventing political appointments being ratified by congress, so there is not another avenue for them to oppose him besides win the next elections.
Deciding to stop trump via making even more egregious breaks in rules and laws than what Trump is doing may satisfy your tribal instincts and will make things worse, and doing anything more than what they are doing that is not breaking rules and laws would just be performative nonsense that has no affect. I guess you want more of that?
Part of the problem is that the Democrats haven't controlled both houses of Congress at any point that Trump has been in power and only held the House from 2018-2020. You could have an all-DSA caucus, and the result probably doesn't change. That said, I agree that part of the reason the Dems are at this inflection point is that their party has been so aimless and feeble that it's basically enabled a takeover.
Jimmy Stewart obviously would have made a fortune on Only Fans though.