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It's just a little bit fucking wild that Sanders was the only real progressive in 2016, because he's the only one who hasn't turned tail and started endorsing Trump.
We really need to be more aware how deeply conservatives are trying to turn progressives.
That's why I'm incredibly skeptical of some of the "leftist" accounts that constantly go out of their way to exclusively demonize the Democratic Party.
As one of those leftists, it's sad but understandable for people to be skeptical at this point.
I have a lot of issues with the Democratic party, but its because I don't have another party to vote for. I could waste my time critiquing Republicans, but they're so far off the map of rationality that it feels silly and pointless. Democrats are still at least offering positions that can be critiqued outside "that was an outright lie" which is all you can say about Republican "policies."
I try to frontload those comments to make clear nothing could ever convince me to vote Republican or withhold my vote when they're trying to fucking roll over democracy into autocracy.
I do find it interesting that the Overton window in the US has now shifted so far to the right that there’s a clear space for moderate leftists with no overlap with the Democrats. But until the Republicans aren’t any sort of a threat, actually trying to build a leftist party will go nowhere due to the risk that Republicans can still get more of the vote than any single party to their left.
That could be coming if the Republicans get hammered enough this election. I can only hope.
They are "dying," demographically, and to stay relevant it requires the party to start casting a wider net and getting more people on their side, which naturally means becoming less extremist and way less racist. They've hitched their destiny to white supremacism, and we're on the verge of them mostly becoming so marginal than it might actually be time for the growth of a real left party. They're unwilling (and probably unable) to change the trajectory of their own party, so that's why they are going for broke with as much cheating as possible, because it may genuinely be one of the last elections where they matter at all, electorally.
Further, we also have Democrats who think we need a "strong Republican party," like Nancy Pelosi, are finally retiring and are being replaced by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are a lot less sure we need a Republican party... because in their eyes the Democrats are already right-wing as it is.
This doesn't mean the Republicans will disappear, but there might be enough room electorally for a real leftist party to grow in the space left behind.
Personal opinion, but it stands as part of why I'm willing to put myself down for the "lesser evil" here. Long-term, we might have a less evil lesser evil to choose from if we can successfully kill the Republicans demographically so that no amount of gerrymandering can save them as a party.
I wish I could share your optimism. They’ve hitched their cart to a number of horses; white nationalism, conservative US Christian fundamentalism (which isn’t conservative, Christian or fundamentalist except in name), and the conspiracy camp. There’s overlap between those three, but they each have separate non-negotiable items they’ll always vote for.
And the problem with chasing those groups is that if Republicans attempt to court more moderate conservatives, those groups will do whatever they can to burn everything down.
So the party won’t just fade out as people leave; it is stuck where it is and won’t die until all its supporters (current and future) have died.
Yeah combined with the disproportionate representation that the small population/empty states get, and the electoral college, they’re likely to remain a threat unless and until we can get rank choice voting and interstate popular vote compact working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
From that link
It's populism. You have to see if someone's policy positions are consistent over time, that they have a specific ideal they are following, vs what they think is the most popular policies.
Granted, it's a huge pain with new politicians when they don't have that history, but I think Tulsi had a pretty clear history that showed she wasn't progressive.
She was openly against gay people up until only about a few years ago when she switched to being against trans people.
Gabbard was conservative from the start, people just got caught up in the story of her rebelling against the DNC. If they'd applied a little more scrutiny to her past they wouldn't have assumed she was a progressive.
Bernie's big problem was that he liked to surround himself with charismatic people who would puff his ego while being outside the establishment structure, which is fertile ground for grifters. They ran out of room for grifting in the Bernie lane and there's all this conservative money floating around for turncoats and wreckers, so of course a lot of them ended up following that path.
It's not that liking charismatic flatterers is all that different from a lot of establishment politicians, but for them there's a deeper web of power making it both harder to advance a personal brand and easier to keep the money-train running indefinitely if you play ball.
I know you're talking about progressives in the Democratic primary but all of the remaining members of the Squad are still solidly progressive with no signs of switching teams. If there's any evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it. Generally I feel like pseudoprogressive folks like Gabbard were behaving suspiciously from the start.