The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country.
…Hakeem Jeffries, who is running for speaker of the House, will not commit to holding a vote on abolishing ICE. He opposes Medicare for All. He has said he will not hold Trump accountable for the human rights violations committed, portraying it as a question of “getting even” rather than achieving justice where it was denied. Chuck Schumer, who holds similar positions, has an extraordinarily low approval rating – yet plans to run for majority leader in the Senate. Electeds are questioning whether these men should hold these roles.
But the dissent must also come from us, as it has been. We need to demand an end to the fast violence of guns on our streets trained on our neighbors, bombs dropped from the sky and the slow violence of people dying because their healthcare was denied or their food stamps were cut.
We need to organize, and mobilize, to demand the multi-racial democracy we were promised – not a playground for the rich to get richer on the time and labor and lives of the poor.
it kind of varied with region. Here in Texas both Talarico & Hinajosa are certainly more centrist in their approaches, and I don’t think open progressives could have won a Statewide elections here like they did.
Completely agree, but for anyone not in Texas you need to understand that for a lot of people here “average centrist” is basically “militant communist terrorism”.
In retrospect (and purely, only in retrospect), if we had packed the ballots with progressives they’d have gotten in anyway. I feel strongly that the election was decided here in Texas by low information voters doing the opposite of what they did last time because that’s all they could think to do. I really don’t think it went any deeper than that. The fascists knew that about their base, that’s why all their ads have always been fear based. This time, real world fear was flying in the face of the manufactured fear, and it became impossible to ignore any longer. Many of these people have never left the state. They’ve only seen six dollar diesel in memes about California. When they saw that at home it was like seeing a tiger in their kitchen. They ran for the voting booths the same way they’d run for the shotgun.
Under no circumstances would I have ever placed a bet on a statewide blue sweep! I remember Anne Richards, I feel like she’d be happy about this outcome.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
It helped having a President who pissed everyone off though. Maybe with some work we can turn some of the centric Republicans to the left a bit, if we can show having power to the left means results. It isn’t over, it hasn’t even started yet.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You could argue this happened in 1992, and it would also be the last time centrism won an election. In 1992, Democrats had basically given up on the political hegemony that had defined them since WW2, and accepted the political hegemony of neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan. And they won on it. It won an election for them.
And since that time, Democrats have been convinced that they had to run to the center to get “moderate” voters, when in reality, “centrist”/“moderate” voters never actually manifested. It was a middling black-swan event, but what it did, is it gave corporate democrats a hall pass to permanently assume a thing about a thing that didnʻt exist or even actually happen.
The very principal of a left versus right spectrum, represented as a normal distribution, is a construct of liberalism1. Its a way to represent an assumption about how voters think and behave and are distributed. And you are under no obligation to accept this construction. And when this construction has to get pushed up against reality; real actual voters with real actual data, it falls apart2. And this is because voters are messy, complicated, contradictory things. And this should be an obvious explanation because actual voters are actual people, and actual people are messy, complicated, contradictory things. A scientific materialist should faithfully reconstruct the models, push the models against the data, and reject the models which donʻt match the data. Any rational person who has borne witness to the previous decades of politics should recognize how the liberal construction of voters behave doesnʻt map to the data. It canʻt predict outcomes. There are ways of analyzing politics which do predict future states. But if you narrow your view to what assumptions liberalism demands you make, youʻll struggle to predict future state of politics, which is the ultimate test of any theory. If
You are not obligated to accept the assumptions of liberalism. And if the assumptions of liberalism dont predict beyond the data theyʻre trained on, you should reject those assumptions. You are not immediately obligated to accept other assumptions. In science, we reject theories all the time when the evidence tells us to, and sometimes that leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about how that system works. But it is better to be uncertain than it is to be comfortably wrong.
1: I consider liberalism to be the parent philosophy of democratic liberalism, republican conservatism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism; all of these extension find their roots in liberalism. Two philosophies not finding their roots here are social democracy (roots in marxism), and american fascism (roots in nazism/ european fascism).
2: I can go into explaining this, but I want to keep the argument brief. The case involves multivariate analysis and stats.
Centrism won 2020, kinda. Exactly because of the president who pissed everyone off first
It feels like a safe trap to fall into. Republicans have the easier task because they just cater to where people are and use fearmongering to get there. Ends justify means. But it’s nonconstructive. Blind lead the blind. To me that’s definitionally conservatism. When lost, Democrats feel they just need to be Republican-lite (or they are themselves compromised assets – like Sinema, Fetterman, Schumer, etc.).
Democrats have to actually persuade and have a vision and lead the electorate, which can be a harder task. When they have charismatic leadership who can sell this with conviction, this is when they succeed. Especially when as you point out the other side is fresh off of being exposed for the grifters they are (gas prices, etc.)
The fear mongering works because liberal centrists always fail. Democrats has just to be a real opposition that do what rhey preach and abide with international laws
There’s a superseding point. The fearmongering works because the electorate is uninformed and misinformed by megaphones of fearmongering from conservative billionaire megaphones and erosion of education and diversification of media. Yes, we should’ve stuck with FDR’s New Deal approach and his desire for a Second Bill of Rights. But the Business Plot 2 (Reagan) and 3 (Trump) won – especially with aid from foreign interference most notably Russia and Israel but possibly China too.
This makes those who try to do the right thing less palatable to the masses because Fox News & Friends is telling them that any leftist is the literal devil.
Not an easy task to overcome, but tell me a viable path for how we put a Mamdani, AES, AOC in Arkansas and Alabama and I’ll listen.
Just a note on the FDR comment - I love history, not an expert in the details, but most of FDR’s deals dried up and were discontinued because at the time it seemed their need was done. WWII made unemployment practically disappear, and much of what FDR did was to try and give jobs to everyone. A lot of the rest went away once liberal Republicans (Eisenhower) got taken into the Democrat side as Dixiecrats planned their takeover. Reagan was the first major result of that move, and it took over the country fast since businesses loved it.
If people did not notice their lives getting worse due to failure of liberal a lot of them will not fall into the propaganda that immigrants are the source of all problems. Instead of understanding the root causes and try to solve it people like prefer to complain about regular people ans whitewash the liberals failures leading to more people voting for fascism
The more progressives that respect their engagement wins , the more it will be easier to win in harder places
That didn’t stop conservatives whose lives continue to get worse voting for Republicans in Arkansas and Alabama, so I’m not understanding your point?
I’m 100% all for getting more progressives in office, fully embrace a Social Democratic Nordic Model — but I’m still not seeing this viable path to actually getting even a liberal let alone a progressive candidate on the ballot and to vote for in the likes of Arkansas and Alabama.
And are you American? I see you moderate Europe, so perhaps there is a disconnect in one’s understanding of our electoral system and the breadth, depth, and pulse of this nation and its particular states’ electoral makeup.
Conservatives always wins after the democrats and worldwide liberals centrists fail. Look at France, le pen has big chance of being next president after Macron centrism failed and led to civil disobedience. It took
I’ve already acknowledged agreement of the problem; the question is implementation of a solution. If I could magically snap my fingers and put a Mamdani, AES, AOC, Talarico in every single seat in government, I would.
But again the forces of money and how poorly educated the electorate is means sometimes persuasion to vote for a better candidate doesn’t come in time, and then we must choose between Center-Right and Far-Right because the electorate only voted for these two choices, given the paradigm I laid out in my original comment.
The electoral college is a problem for those states, but if that can be tackled, two of Alabama’s districts fell to blue this time, and one of Alabama’s got reasonably close, mostly because of urban Little Rock’s votes.
Rural is going to vote red until they realize, through years of results and through educational messaging, that Republicans aren’t going to ever help them.
Yeah I absolutely believe from here through 2028 the most progressive members of the coalition should be going to these places – kind of how AOC and Bernie reached out to rural voters in West Virginia this past cycle.
It’s the only way to make inroads and to short-circuit the onslaught of money and propaganda that comes from their televisions, social media algorithms, and churches.
My only point is that there comes a point when you must make a choice between two non-ideal candidates, and take what you will. I’m doubting these candidates had the most progressive platforms in the general election, but hey, they did elect their first open trans state legislator (I assume that’s a gerrymandered district, much how Maxwell Frost can win uncontested in FL).
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
Yes, centrist candidates tend to perform well in two-party systems. However, in systems with open primaries and/or two-round systems, centrist candidates can struggle to reach the final round. Indeed, US politics became much more polarized after the introduction of open primaries.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You need their votes to win any election.
You can’t even get your own voters to show up (2 million Ds sat out the last Presidential election).
You need independent votes to win anything. There aren’t enough Ds or Rs (28% each). Without independent support (of which centrists are the majority, two thirds) you lose. Every time.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/fact-sheet/party-affiliation-fact-sheet-npors/
Math never lies. Partisans do
Democrats focused on basic, universally appealing topics so in a sense that is centrism. The real test will be how they can approach more divisive social issues.
In the global sense - 32 of the 33 OECD (“developed”) countries have some form of universal healthcare, so yeah, that’s a “centrist” issue, and anyone against universal healthcase is, in that sense, already right-wing. Same, really, with most social safety nets.
So it always rankles me when someone in the US claims to be “centrist”. Not only is that already right-wing, but with the Overton Window, it really IS generally right-wing.
I mean fucking duh. And no matter how desperately Matt Iglesias or Rahm Immanuel try and twist this, theyʻll never win another election for Democrats.
on Bill Maher show last night (a hate watch for me) they were going on about how the midterm results were specifically NOT in support of the DSA and “extreme leftist” policy and i am like, bitch, the fact that you feel the need to deny it at all is the massive win here. 🙄
This vote was against Jeffries and Schumer.
Democrats are only 28% of the voters (just like Republicans).
Independents are 44% of the voters (of which centrists are a significant part, over 30% alone… still a larger segment than D or R parties)
Centrism wins every election.
D and Rs are shrinking, and have for years.
(Independents are very rare on Lemmy, but not in the real world, which is the exact opposite of Lemmy)
I’m an independent voter who doesn’t like the Democrats because I’m a fucking anarchist, cope harder.
Also, we literally all know what kind of “centrist” you are, Lemmy is a small place.
Independents are 44% of the voters (of which centrists are a significant part, over 30% alone… still a larger segment than D or R parties)
Bullshit.
cost of living defeated the republicans. Democrats were barely even along for the ride.
cruelty and grift played no part in the election huh? Interesting theory-- that someone else made up for you hoping you’d accept and consume. Cant go looking at other causes.
cruelty and grift
I genuinely perceive this as adorably optimistic. No, most people just care about their daily needs. The knitted skullcap Antichrist rapes, present tense, and independents began to care once gas rose above $5 per gallon. What in the world makes you think that ethics somehow played a part in this?
Not As Bad As Republican is the only choice Americans are offered.
If they’re too lazy to vote every centrist out of the Democratic party during the primaries that’s on them for not choosing who they want representing the democrat side by going to vote during every election
The Republican party is a lost cause
