The Time-Honored Tradition of Blaming the Left for Democratic Defeats This argument is particularly unconvincing this time around. And it doesn’t offer a realistic prescription for future success. The Time-Honored Tradition of Blaming the Left for Democratic Defeats
| | | | | | | | | | | The Time-Honored Tradition of Blaming the Left for Democratic Defeats Kate Aronoff This argument is particularly unconvincing this time around. And it doesn’t offer a realistic prescription for f... | | | The Democratic Party is looking for a scapegoat for its disastrous 2024 election performance. As ever, no shortage of pundits and party operatives are punching left. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres accused his colleagues of “pandering” to the “far left.” Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton scolded the party for, apparently, being too considerate of trans kids, whom Republicans targeted with at least $17 million worth of ads. “I have two little girls,” he told The New York Times for a November 7 story on how the party was relating to its losses. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” | | | | | | | | | | | Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future In interviews, lawmakers and strategists tried to explain Kamala Harris’s defeat, pointing to misinformation, th... | | | As journalist Dan Denvir wrote before the election, Democrats this cycle fell back on an old playbook of trying to outflank Republicans on immigration. They championed a bill chock-full of the right’s preferred policies, like expanding ICE detention capacity and restricting asylum, then campaigned on the fact that the GOP voted it down when Trump told them to. Having previously called Trump’s border wall a “medieval vanity project,” Harris then pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building it. As Denvir writes, “Given the choice to pander to reactionaries or shore up the party’s left wing, Democrats tend to prioritize the former. The result is a dangerous asymmetric polarization: Republicans radicalize on immigration, while Democratic elites chase after them. The ‘normal’ position on immigration moves ever rightward.” | | | | | | | | | | | Do Border | Daniel Denvir This is the state of American immigration politics: a destructive competition over who can do border better. But... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Harris flip-flops on building the border wall Alex Thompson,Hans Nichols It's the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on past liberal positions. | | | Orienting the party toward winning over particular sets of so-called moderates every four years seems unlikely to help the end goal of building a durable governing majority—yet that’s precisely what Democrats have done. As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put it before Trump was elected, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Harris—who tacked right on immigration, campaigned with Liz Cheney, and boasted about booming oil and gas production—proceeded to lose all of the states Schumer mentioned except for Illinois. Roughly the same number of registered Republicans voted for her as had voted for Biden in 2020. It’s entirely possible that Harris still wouldn’t have won if she’d listened more to progressive interest groups’ messaging advice; she might even have done worse. That’s partly because the Democratic Party’s problem isn’t messaging so much as the fact that its highest-profile leaders (including Harris) don’t seem to believe anything they say—centrist, progressive, or otherwise. There’s no easy way out of this bind. Continuing to tack right, blame the left, and then tack even farther right as a corrective—hemorrhaging reliable Democratic constituencies along the way—doesn’t seem like a promising solution. If the Democratic Party is to have any kind of future, it can’t just keep doing battle on fields Republicans choose; voters who want to vote for the GOP’s positions will vote for the GOP. Democrats will need to convince ever-growing majorities why it’s better to be governed by them every single year, at all levels of government—not just why the alternative is scarier. To do that they’ll have to influence public opinion rather than just respond to it. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33712): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33712 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109744897/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
