Excellent essay, the only thing I'd add is: the actually existing working class, the ones who actually live here in America (and especially the men), are much more likely to support Trump than Bernie. The DSA fantasy that working class conservatives are simply suffering from false consciousness, and the scales will fall from their eyes once the hated liberals stop preventing the DSA from showing the working class the light, is at least as old as the late 19th-century "Going to the People" by the Russian communist intelligentsia.
It's an especially pathetic fallacy now, given how much leftists organize their cultural politics around an absolute loathing of the very same working class Americans in whose welfare they're supposedly acting.
There was a decent case to be made in 2016 that a certain group of working class white men were up for grabs between Trump and Bernie, but that ignores what happened in the meantime: they voted for Trump 3 times! And in the past 10 years, the Democratic Party has become more hostile to “whiteness,” to men, and to the plebs who voted for Trump. And even Bernie has changed: in 2016, he was more centrist on immigration and guns and way less “woke.” Leftists are constantly replaying a scenario that never happened where the political world was frozen in amber for 10 years.
Which is more or less how you end up with a candidate like Platner. I think these people legitimately believe that a fuckup domestic abuser with a Nazi tattoo and a Don Draper streak of infidelity is representative of the median white working class person. If you read between the lines, you can really see the contempt they must have for those people to actually think that.
Yeah. That false consciousness has been the problem for a while. It can’t possibly be that Marxist ideas are just:
1) bad
2) failures
3) 19th-century German romanticism masquerading as serious thought
Plus, their representatives, with a few exceptions, are deeply unappealing.
The inability to accept that the last 150-200
years or so have seen remarkable human progress is mind boggling. Prior to the enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, life expectancy and economic output per person was pretty much unchanged since the beginning of civilization, with exceptions for war and famine, when people went from subsisting to dying. The ingratitude and/or historical illiteracy is horrendous, and dangerous.
The GOP has little incentive to improve - i.e. become sane - if the Democrats became insane. That would be bad. Two insane parties would both have a roughly 50/50 in each election, but you would get retarded “policy” regardless.
Yeah it's incredibly frustrating how many leftists think that conservative dudes who hate Democrats for being "socialists" would be completely smitten by a Jewish, atheist, self-described socialist who openly wants to raise taxes.
It was ever thus, going back to when socialism was first imported to Western Europe. Upper-middle-class people (like the Fabian Society) would give speeches about Burning The Fucking System To The Ground to working-class people, who would listen politely and then say "yeah, no thanks". Western communists have never been able to reach the people they claim to represent.
What the working class did with socialism was promote trade unionism, which despite some definite periods of overreach, 1) overall made the world a much better place and 2) actually works.
Also, let's be real here: the progressive left, for all their bleating about how Trump, MAGA, Project 2025, and Elon Musk are all Existential Threats to Our Democracy, do not actually act like it.
Their consistent pattern is to nominate candidates and endorse policy positions that *alienate* the normie centrists who they need in order to win. Forex, if they were serious about defeating Trump and Trumpism, we would be talking right now about whether Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, or Gretchen Whitmer was going to be the Democratic nominee in 2028. Gavin Newsom, AOC, and Kamala Harris wouldn't even be on the table.
Instead, their primary concern is ideological purity tests, much as the MAGA right's primary concern is fealty to Trump. That John Fetterman, who votes with Democrats 80% of the time on the big stuff and is a senator from a state that voted for Trump in two of the last three elections is considered "a disappointment" is insane, especially considering the structural advantage the GOP has in the Senate.
"Gavin Newsom, AOC, and Kamala Harris wouldn't even be on the table."
AOC has impressed me by having a longer career than I expected. She's shrewd enough to realise which side her bread is buttered on, and has stopped butting heads with the party bigwigs and instead concentrated on keeping her seat. This lets her still pop up from time to time with the pale pink socialism-lite comments which get publicity and keep the fringes happy, while not doing anything substantial that will annoy the party big shots (I think her stunt at the Met Gala in 2021 was the perfect example of this: turn up to expensive bash in designer gown blazoned with "tax the rich" while you rub elbows and hob-nob with those same rich who will be donating to the Democratic party; a genuine radical lefty wouldn't be seen dead at such an event, unless they were outside with a placard and throwing eggs at the nobs attending).
Gavin Newsom's recent pivot to "I had a hardscrabble upbringing as a child of a single mom who worked three jobs to support us and I also am dyslexic, and I'm an Irish Catholic rebel as well, so I can identify with you, ordinary lower-middle class Joe Soap! I only got to hang out in the homes of billionaires as close family friends, not be the son of a billionaire myself!" is the most entertaining re-invention I can think of, but it's too late for that, Gav. The stench of the French Laundry still clings to you (not so much the rules-breaking as 'thinks it's perfectly normal to dine at hoity-toity restaurants like that').
(I'm not saying Keller's establishment isn't worth it, the amount of time, effort and toil they put into their dishes and the quality of food justifies the priciness, but the prices sure ain't in the budget of 'hardscrabble dyslexics').
Gavin, AOC, and Kamala are not the same. Gavin and Kamala are boring standard-issue limousine liberals, while AOC is leftist-lite. But they all have one thing in common: they’ll all get fucking destroyed if the Dems put them up in 2028.
Trump's polling is so bad and could conceivably get worse that Newsom or Harris would not get destroyed by Vance or Rubio. A Republican blowout is extremely unlikely, but a Democrat blowout is also extremely unlikely. Newsom winning a nail bitter off of Trump's incompetency with tiny Congressional majorities shouldn't be the goal.
But yet Trump only won against Kamala by a pretty slim margin considering that Biden was massively unpopular and had to be forced out after his debacle debate performance 😎well still I don’t think the democrats should run her she really has no independent following like Sanders.
Let's consider the fact that Trump won an outright majority of the popular vote against Harris, a feat he didn't manage against <i>Hillary Clinton</i>.
Fetterman is a disappointment as a Congressman - he literally does not do large portions of his job - but as a Democrat, it could be worse. That said, talking about him is a lot different from talking about Shapiro or Whitmer as far as who would improve the party by having more like them.
Fetterman clearly has long term neurological damage, which is sad, but he really shouldn’t be serving as a Senator. If we demand that old senators with dementia step down, he really should too.
It was the milquetoast center-left libs who warned of the dangers of MAGA/Trump/Project 2025; the DSA-type far left mostly dismissed the concerns as the fearmongering of pro-establishment types who just wanted to win votes and uphold the status quo.
"Their consistent pattern is to nominate candidates and endorse policy positions that *alienate* the normie centrists who they need in order to win."
Puts me in mind of Momentum here in the UK (the grassroots base of Jeremy Corbyn, who himself seemed a nice enough guy if not very good at politics). Their message to centrists and centre-left people was basically "vote for us, you Red Tory scum!". And then they were apparently shocked that they lost the election.
That's fair up to a point, but do they not see Trump as worse? At least normie centrists wouldn't turn ICE into the 21st century version of the Brownshirts.
Let me turn that around on you. Is having brown shirts a price worth paying for not electing AOC? Much of the commentary here suggests that they'll go for the brownshirts to spite progressives if forced to chose.
I certainly wouldnt, but I think pretty clearly a lot of people would. And if the republicans ever become a non brownshirt party again, that number will be much larger.
Not really. Centrists really dislike implementing anything close to socialist policy. They want different things than MAGA, but they haven't been willing to actually go for the jugular since Nixon got pardoned and all his people skated, so how much maga will be prosecuted and maga policy reversed is an open question.
For example, ICE. Progressives want it gone, MAGA wants it bigger and more aggressive, centrists largely seem to want to keep it with some tweaks.
Trump was prosecuted and convicted, as were the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Progressives want to abolish ICE and replace it with something different, which is the same as keeping it with some tweaks, except that it's meaninglessly performative.
You don't seem to understand what progressives want, and assume it's the same as centrists.
Trump was prosecuted for sexual assault. He was prosecuted for business fraud. The consequences, however, were successfully deflected, and the majority of the lawsuits against him either died on the vine or were settled behind NDAs. Much like how all the jan 6th convictions got pardoned.
None of that happened because of centrists; all of it happened because of Republicans.
Do progressives want there to be any immigration enforcement at all? If the answer is no, then very few people will or should vote for you. If the answer is yes, then some organization must exist to enforce it.
In Portland, Oregon, the city Council is controlled to a large extent by a unified block of 6 councilors, out of 12 total, who are DSA members or DSA allies. The DSA has only 3,000 members in the city, but it is on the verge of running the city council, which is nominally “nonpartisan.” There are no Republicans anywhere in sight . The local Democratic Party seems to be blind to and unconcerned about the DSA’s attempts to displace it. This all reminds me of the struggles between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.
I agree about the DSA, but the only problem is that they’ve already been dominating the Democratic Party. They definitely controlled the ever more senile Biden administration. Measured by votes, policies and statements, the takeover of the Democratic Party by its socialist wing through the donor class and staffer bureaucracy already happened. 40 out of 47 senators already voted to help the IRGC and its proxies kill as many Israeli Jews as they can. Kamala already got hit by the slogans on trans she adopted from the DSA-aligned progressives (fuzzy boundary there). The Democrats already took their knee in Congress in theatrical appeasement of the DSA wing. Obama already showed up to boost the image of Mamdani. The leadership already showed up to boost Platner.
The purge could have happened after 2024, but instead the party is trying to capture those sweet Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes votes. Accept it or not, antisemitism is the big tent idea of the Democrats. The DSA has rotted out the party.
That’s actually a pretty good picture of how Biden lost it on border security by having his policy be dictated by these progressive activists who favored an open border policy that was a disaster for the democrats and was weaponized by people like Greg Abbot of Texas that sent overwhelming numbers of illegal migrant to New York and Chicago. Obviously the DSA with its open door policy was perfectly cool with that shitshow… regular people… not so much 😂 What the democrats need is a convincing plan to have an immigration and border policy that allows people with skills to enter and vets people a lot better so we don’t have crimes committed by the people we let in!
LOL is intelligent, as always. 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to make sure that Hamas and Hezbollah IEDs kill as many Israelis as possible. A similar number voted to make sure Israel’s Air Force can’t stop Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis ballistic missile launches. Bombs is how Israel takes out Iran’s ballistic missile capability, and the Free Palestine cult needs to hear that the Democrats want to help the IRGC kill Israeli civilians. https://rabbistevenabraham.substack.com/p/40-out-of-47
I believe it because there's endless proof for it. I say it publicly because retarded socialist children like yourself shouldn't be coddled, appeased or have their votes sought after. In fact, I want socialists to stop their Long March tactics and create their own party, and fail on their own, rather than tank the Democratic Party time after time, and assist Trump getting elected time after time.
DSA members should be barred from Democratic Party primaries. They're members of a different political party, and should run as DSA members. So long, Frau, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. The Democratic Party should focus on the vast number of moderates in the United States.
Like some people have described Trump as "a poor person's idea of what a rich person is like" Platner is a sheltered liberal's idea of what a working class person is like.
Excellent essay, wise and necessary. And if only it came to pass that "sane, solution-oriented Democrats win this factional fight," then this used-to-be-Democrat voter who is now anything-but-D would be happy to vote D again. It seems unlikely at this point . . . but one can only hope essays like this will be helpful.
Also, it does not help, currently, to vote for what few sane Democrats might actually be electable . . . they just go to Washington and vote right along with the whackos.
And voting for the sane ones also could lead to Dem majorities, which would be disastrous, since, as you said, most of the sane ones will vote with the kooks, since the kooks have made so much noise they’ve convinced the sane ones that that’s where the “energy” is (a self-perpetuating delusion).
Henry-Kissinger-if-he-was-a-valley-girl: perfect description of that horrendous guy's way of speaking. Also: how is vocal fry, even more annoying than upspeaking, still in existence in our degraded world, degrading it further every day?
I think about this story regularly. It is about Dem women who won seats in red states. They complained that rather than the media focusing on how their moderate positions helped them win, the media was fucking obsessed with the Squad.
So I think it is important to underline that much of the support for DSA candidates comes from young reporters who share the candidates' values.
Some folks characterize the DSA as a bunch of champagne socialists, which can imply a certain je ne sais quoi. But je ne se, I think their quoi is a load of merde, and the DSA is better characterized as a bunch of delusional and stupid assholes.
"These days, I complain about the socialist left more than the MAGA right, which might lead people to think that I’m experiencing a Heart of Darkness-style slow drift towards Trump."
I can picture you lying in the dark, breathing your last, muttering, "The MAGA. The MAGA."
You are right about the DSA. Now please address Progressives, the DSA Lite. Work like this is essential.
Here's something about MAGA that this piece brought to mind: MAGA can and does function well in the private sector. Small businesses and whatnot. They buy their own BS which is a huge problem in politics and governance, but in daily life, they are functional.
The DSA/leftists more broadly share a large fraction of the blame for MAGA. By turning Dems into the party of the crazy left, many voters chose the lesser of the evils for their values.
Keep your thoughts coming. From an electability standpoint, it would be nice to see real grassroots candidates of the people in lieu of groomed “of the people” candidates. Our DNC forced candidate in WI lost to a very VERY beatable Ron Johnson, but he sure was everything the DNC thought we wanted in WI… except he wasn’t.
I find it hard to believe that mainstream Mainers are in love with either option, and that’s what happens when we’re told who we should like and an incredible amount of $$$$ is spent: we’re still left with a choice we don’t want to make.
In most of my life it doesn't feel like the DSA is very "important," but then primaries happen or I remember that all kinds of political movements start as "not very important."
I think you're undervaluing the chance of a Republican pivot towards sanity vs a Democrat pivot in the post Trump world. Republicans are at least getting somewhat tired of Trump and have a lot of good state and federal level figures (e.g. Rubio or Tate Reeves) with successful track records who'd do a good job leading the country. With Democrats otoh the momentum is all with the dsa, and even the "moderate" alternatives is people like Newsome whose tenure as Governor has been a story of continuous decline. I think moderate Republicans are, while far from certain, both more likely to come back within their party and more competent to lead the country if they manage it.
(I also, separately, think the dsa would be significantly worse than maga if they led the country. It's hard to prove because they haven't had real power before outside of a few disasters in local government, but a dea led democratic party won't be a return to Bill Clinton style normal government).
Excellent essay, the only thing I'd add is: the actually existing working class, the ones who actually live here in America (and especially the men), are much more likely to support Trump than Bernie. The DSA fantasy that working class conservatives are simply suffering from false consciousness, and the scales will fall from their eyes once the hated liberals stop preventing the DSA from showing the working class the light, is at least as old as the late 19th-century "Going to the People" by the Russian communist intelligentsia.
It's an especially pathetic fallacy now, given how much leftists organize their cultural politics around an absolute loathing of the very same working class Americans in whose welfare they're supposedly acting.
There was a decent case to be made in 2016 that a certain group of working class white men were up for grabs between Trump and Bernie, but that ignores what happened in the meantime: they voted for Trump 3 times! And in the past 10 years, the Democratic Party has become more hostile to “whiteness,” to men, and to the plebs who voted for Trump. And even Bernie has changed: in 2016, he was more centrist on immigration and guns and way less “woke.” Leftists are constantly replaying a scenario that never happened where the political world was frozen in amber for 10 years.
Which is more or less how you end up with a candidate like Platner. I think these people legitimately believe that a fuckup domestic abuser with a Nazi tattoo and a Don Draper streak of infidelity is representative of the median white working class person. If you read between the lines, you can really see the contempt they must have for those people to actually think that.
100%. It’s beyond insulting.
Yeah. That false consciousness has been the problem for a while. It can’t possibly be that Marxist ideas are just:
1) bad
2) failures
3) 19th-century German romanticism masquerading as serious thought
Plus, their representatives, with a few exceptions, are deeply unappealing.
The inability to accept that the last 150-200
years or so have seen remarkable human progress is mind boggling. Prior to the enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, life expectancy and economic output per person was pretty much unchanged since the beginning of civilization, with exceptions for war and famine, when people went from subsisting to dying. The ingratitude and/or historical illiteracy is horrendous, and dangerous.
The GOP has little incentive to improve - i.e. become sane - if the Democrats became insane. That would be bad. Two insane parties would both have a roughly 50/50 in each election, but you would get retarded “policy” regardless.
Yeah it's incredibly frustrating how many leftists think that conservative dudes who hate Democrats for being "socialists" would be completely smitten by a Jewish, atheist, self-described socialist who openly wants to raise taxes.
It was ever thus, going back to when socialism was first imported to Western Europe. Upper-middle-class people (like the Fabian Society) would give speeches about Burning The Fucking System To The Ground to working-class people, who would listen politely and then say "yeah, no thanks". Western communists have never been able to reach the people they claim to represent.
What the working class did with socialism was promote trade unionism, which despite some definite periods of overreach, 1) overall made the world a much better place and 2) actually works.
That’s a big problem with some of these snooty lefties 😎
History does NOT repeat itself 🤔😂
Also, let's be real here: the progressive left, for all their bleating about how Trump, MAGA, Project 2025, and Elon Musk are all Existential Threats to Our Democracy, do not actually act like it.
Their consistent pattern is to nominate candidates and endorse policy positions that *alienate* the normie centrists who they need in order to win. Forex, if they were serious about defeating Trump and Trumpism, we would be talking right now about whether Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, or Gretchen Whitmer was going to be the Democratic nominee in 2028. Gavin Newsom, AOC, and Kamala Harris wouldn't even be on the table.
Instead, their primary concern is ideological purity tests, much as the MAGA right's primary concern is fealty to Trump. That John Fetterman, who votes with Democrats 80% of the time on the big stuff and is a senator from a state that voted for Trump in two of the last three elections is considered "a disappointment" is insane, especially considering the structural advantage the GOP has in the Senate.
"Gavin Newsom, AOC, and Kamala Harris wouldn't even be on the table."
AOC has impressed me by having a longer career than I expected. She's shrewd enough to realise which side her bread is buttered on, and has stopped butting heads with the party bigwigs and instead concentrated on keeping her seat. This lets her still pop up from time to time with the pale pink socialism-lite comments which get publicity and keep the fringes happy, while not doing anything substantial that will annoy the party big shots (I think her stunt at the Met Gala in 2021 was the perfect example of this: turn up to expensive bash in designer gown blazoned with "tax the rich" while you rub elbows and hob-nob with those same rich who will be donating to the Democratic party; a genuine radical lefty wouldn't be seen dead at such an event, unless they were outside with a placard and throwing eggs at the nobs attending).
Gavin Newsom's recent pivot to "I had a hardscrabble upbringing as a child of a single mom who worked three jobs to support us and I also am dyslexic, and I'm an Irish Catholic rebel as well, so I can identify with you, ordinary lower-middle class Joe Soap! I only got to hang out in the homes of billionaires as close family friends, not be the son of a billionaire myself!" is the most entertaining re-invention I can think of, but it's too late for that, Gav. The stench of the French Laundry still clings to you (not so much the rules-breaking as 'thinks it's perfectly normal to dine at hoity-toity restaurants like that').
(I'm not saying Keller's establishment isn't worth it, the amount of time, effort and toil they put into their dishes and the quality of food justifies the priciness, but the prices sure ain't in the budget of 'hardscrabble dyslexics').
Gavin, AOC, and Kamala are not the same. Gavin and Kamala are boring standard-issue limousine liberals, while AOC is leftist-lite. But they all have one thing in common: they’ll all get fucking destroyed if the Dems put them up in 2028.
Trump's polling is so bad and could conceivably get worse that Newsom or Harris would not get destroyed by Vance or Rubio. A Republican blowout is extremely unlikely, but a Democrat blowout is also extremely unlikely. Newsom winning a nail bitter off of Trump's incompetency with tiny Congressional majorities shouldn't be the goal.
But yet Trump only won against Kamala by a pretty slim margin considering that Biden was massively unpopular and had to be forced out after his debacle debate performance 😎well still I don’t think the democrats should run her she really has no independent following like Sanders.
Let's consider the fact that Trump won an outright majority of the popular vote against Harris, a feat he didn't manage against <i>Hillary Clinton</i>.
Fetterman is a disappointment as a Congressman - he literally does not do large portions of his job - but as a Democrat, it could be worse. That said, talking about him is a lot different from talking about Shapiro or Whitmer as far as who would improve the party by having more like them.
Fetterman clearly has long term neurological damage, which is sad, but he really shouldn’t be serving as a Senator. If we demand that old senators with dementia step down, he really should too.
It was the milquetoast center-left libs who warned of the dangers of MAGA/Trump/Project 2025; the DSA-type far left mostly dismissed the concerns as the fearmongering of pro-establishment types who just wanted to win votes and uphold the status quo.
"Their consistent pattern is to nominate candidates and endorse policy positions that *alienate* the normie centrists who they need in order to win."
Puts me in mind of Momentum here in the UK (the grassroots base of Jeremy Corbyn, who himself seemed a nice enough guy if not very good at politics). Their message to centrists and centre-left people was basically "vote for us, you Red Tory scum!". And then they were apparently shocked that they lost the election.
I'm wondering why the normie centrists believe that socialists will see electing normie centrists as a victory for the socialists.
That's fair up to a point, but do they not see Trump as worse? At least normie centrists wouldn't turn ICE into the 21st century version of the Brownshirts.
Let me turn that around on you. Is having brown shirts a price worth paying for not electing AOC? Much of the commentary here suggests that they'll go for the brownshirts to spite progressives if forced to chose.
I certainly wouldnt, but I think pretty clearly a lot of people would. And if the republicans ever become a non brownshirt party again, that number will be much larger.
Because normie centrism is closer to socialism than National Conservatism is, so socialists will get more of what they want if normie centrists win.
Not really. Centrists really dislike implementing anything close to socialist policy. They want different things than MAGA, but they haven't been willing to actually go for the jugular since Nixon got pardoned and all his people skated, so how much maga will be prosecuted and maga policy reversed is an open question.
For example, ICE. Progressives want it gone, MAGA wants it bigger and more aggressive, centrists largely seem to want to keep it with some tweaks.
Trump was prosecuted and convicted, as were the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Progressives want to abolish ICE and replace it with something different, which is the same as keeping it with some tweaks, except that it's meaninglessly performative.
You don't seem to understand what progressives want, and assume it's the same as centrists.
Trump was prosecuted for sexual assault. He was prosecuted for business fraud. The consequences, however, were successfully deflected, and the majority of the lawsuits against him either died on the vine or were settled behind NDAs. Much like how all the jan 6th convictions got pardoned.
None of that happened because of centrists; all of it happened because of Republicans.
Do progressives want there to be any immigration enforcement at all? If the answer is no, then very few people will or should vote for you. If the answer is yes, then some organization must exist to enforce it.
If the definition of "victory" is "ushering in the Marxist utopia," of course not.
If the definition of victory is "save America from MAGA", then yes.
In Portland, Oregon, the city Council is controlled to a large extent by a unified block of 6 councilors, out of 12 total, who are DSA members or DSA allies. The DSA has only 3,000 members in the city, but it is on the verge of running the city council, which is nominally “nonpartisan.” There are no Republicans anywhere in sight . The local Democratic Party seems to be blind to and unconcerned about the DSA’s attempts to displace it. This all reminds me of the struggles between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.
I agree about the DSA, but the only problem is that they’ve already been dominating the Democratic Party. They definitely controlled the ever more senile Biden administration. Measured by votes, policies and statements, the takeover of the Democratic Party by its socialist wing through the donor class and staffer bureaucracy already happened. 40 out of 47 senators already voted to help the IRGC and its proxies kill as many Israeli Jews as they can. Kamala already got hit by the slogans on trans she adopted from the DSA-aligned progressives (fuzzy boundary there). The Democrats already took their knee in Congress in theatrical appeasement of the DSA wing. Obama already showed up to boost the image of Mamdani. The leadership already showed up to boost Platner.
The purge could have happened after 2024, but instead the party is trying to capture those sweet Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes votes. Accept it or not, antisemitism is the big tent idea of the Democrats. The DSA has rotted out the party.
That’s actually a pretty good picture of how Biden lost it on border security by having his policy be dictated by these progressive activists who favored an open border policy that was a disaster for the democrats and was weaponized by people like Greg Abbot of Texas that sent overwhelming numbers of illegal migrant to New York and Chicago. Obviously the DSA with its open door policy was perfectly cool with that shitshow… regular people… not so much 😂 What the democrats need is a convincing plan to have an immigration and border policy that allows people with skills to enter and vets people a lot better so we don’t have crimes committed by the people we let in!
40 senators voted for Iran to kill Jews? Wtf lol no? (But which vote or action are you referring to here)
LOL is intelligent, as always. 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to make sure that Hamas and Hezbollah IEDs kill as many Israelis as possible. A similar number voted to make sure Israel’s Air Force can’t stop Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis ballistic missile launches. Bombs is how Israel takes out Iran’s ballistic missile capability, and the Free Palestine cult needs to hear that the Democrats want to help the IRGC kill Israeli civilians. https://rabbistevenabraham.substack.com/p/40-out-of-47
I don't know how you can believe this, say it publicly, and still expect socialists to vote for the people you support.
I believe it because there's endless proof for it. I say it publicly because retarded socialist children like yourself shouldn't be coddled, appeased or have their votes sought after. In fact, I want socialists to stop their Long March tactics and create their own party, and fail on their own, rather than tank the Democratic Party time after time, and assist Trump getting elected time after time.
DSA members should be barred from Democratic Party primaries. They're members of a different political party, and should run as DSA members. So long, Frau, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. The Democratic Party should focus on the vast number of moderates in the United States.
Those DSA morons who found Platner are a parody of Idiocracy.
These people are mentally ill, they have no idea how the world works, nor how to improve anything.
I live in Maine, a guy like Platner stinks inauthenticity, he's a phony with a disordered mind, a Tim Waltz with too much testosterone.
Like some people have described Trump as "a poor person's idea of what a rich person is like" Platner is a sheltered liberal's idea of what a working class person is like.
Hah
But still the lesser of two evils right 🤔😂
Nope.
Excellent essay, wise and necessary. And if only it came to pass that "sane, solution-oriented Democrats win this factional fight," then this used-to-be-Democrat voter who is now anything-but-D would be happy to vote D again. It seems unlikely at this point . . . but one can only hope essays like this will be helpful.
Also, it does not help, currently, to vote for what few sane Democrats might actually be electable . . . they just go to Washington and vote right along with the whackos.
And voting for the sane ones also could lead to Dem majorities, which would be disastrous, since, as you said, most of the sane ones will vote with the kooks, since the kooks have made so much noise they’ve convinced the sane ones that that’s where the “energy” is (a self-perpetuating delusion).
Henry-Kissinger-if-he-was-a-valley-girl: perfect description of that horrendous guy's way of speaking. Also: how is vocal fry, even more annoying than upspeaking, still in existence in our degraded world, degrading it further every day?
Hortense: "Upspeaking," also known as Katie Herzog Syndrome.....
I think about this story regularly. It is about Dem women who won seats in red states. They complained that rather than the media focusing on how their moderate positions helped them win, the media was fucking obsessed with the Squad.
So I think it is important to underline that much of the support for DSA candidates comes from young reporters who share the candidates' values.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-other-squad-moderate-female-democrats-try-to-establish-their-brand-ahead-of-2020?hl=en-US#:~:text=Elissa%20Slotkin%20of%20Michigan%2C%20Mikie,portrayed%20as%20veering%20sharply%20left.
Some folks characterize the DSA as a bunch of champagne socialists, which can imply a certain je ne sais quoi. But je ne se, I think their quoi is a load of merde, and the DSA is better characterized as a bunch of delusional and stupid assholes.
"These days, I complain about the socialist left more than the MAGA right, which might lead people to think that I’m experiencing a Heart of Darkness-style slow drift towards Trump."
I can picture you lying in the dark, breathing your last, muttering, "The MAGA. The MAGA."
Good read, Maurer.
As a conservative, I also would like to see the DSA and DSA-lite ideology get its proper due, which is the trash can.
As a liberal I totally agree
You are right about the DSA. Now please address Progressives, the DSA Lite. Work like this is essential.
Here's something about MAGA that this piece brought to mind: MAGA can and does function well in the private sector. Small businesses and whatnot. They buy their own BS which is a huge problem in politics and governance, but in daily life, they are functional.
The DSA/leftists more broadly share a large fraction of the blame for MAGA. By turning Dems into the party of the crazy left, many voters chose the lesser of the evils for their values.
Keep your thoughts coming. From an electability standpoint, it would be nice to see real grassroots candidates of the people in lieu of groomed “of the people” candidates. Our DNC forced candidate in WI lost to a very VERY beatable Ron Johnson, but he sure was everything the DNC thought we wanted in WI… except he wasn’t.
I find it hard to believe that mainstream Mainers are in love with either option, and that’s what happens when we’re told who we should like and an incredible amount of $$$$ is spent: we’re still left with a choice we don’t want to make.
In most of my life it doesn't feel like the DSA is very "important," but then primaries happen or I remember that all kinds of political movements start as "not very important."
I think you're undervaluing the chance of a Republican pivot towards sanity vs a Democrat pivot in the post Trump world. Republicans are at least getting somewhat tired of Trump and have a lot of good state and federal level figures (e.g. Rubio or Tate Reeves) with successful track records who'd do a good job leading the country. With Democrats otoh the momentum is all with the dsa, and even the "moderate" alternatives is people like Newsome whose tenure as Governor has been a story of continuous decline. I think moderate Republicans are, while far from certain, both more likely to come back within their party and more competent to lead the country if they manage it.
(I also, separately, think the dsa would be significantly worse than maga if they led the country. It's hard to prove because they haven't had real power before outside of a few disasters in local government, but a dea led democratic party won't be a return to Bill Clinton style normal government).