Maybe I spoke too soon when I said that the democratic party was learning something. Sometimes they look like they're learning something, but then it appears they learned nothing at all. And I know I covered their lack of learning a lot, so sorry if I sound like a broken record, but it needs to be said.
Now democrats are already trying to set the narrative for this election's loss by claiming it was BECAUSE THEY MOVED TOO FAR LEFT. This narrative goes that Hillary Clinton moved way to the left to adopt "the most progressive democratic party platform in history", and that the country soundly rejected it by alienating the centrists. They argue that because lefties like me refused to vote for her, we're unreliable voters who can't be counted on and that they must move to the sweet, sweet center in order to appeal to more disaffected republicans and centrists who could go either way. In other words, they're doubling down on a failing strategy.
I've already covered many angles on this topic already, but as you know, my belief is that the democrats failed to unite their party be alienating their left wing supporters and telling us to settle for less and fall in line. They may have FAKED left and pretended to appeal to us (I discussed their compromises when they happened), but they really had no intention on acting on them. As Clinton said in the leaked emails, she has a public position, and a private position, and her private positions....WHOOF. She doesn't really have a progressive bone in her body. And we millennials who get our news from non corporate sources have a well tuned BS detector to detect her fakeness from a mile away. It didn't even matter if she tried to appeal to the left, because she was such a fundamentally flawed candidate to do so, and no one believed her anyway. And honestly, many of the compromises she made seemed like mere window dressing. Okay, sure, she moved to a $15 minimum wage from a $12 one. This is the most minor and meaningless compromise she could have made. Free education was the big one, but even then it's a wonder how much of her original lukewarm plan she would have reverted to after the election. And she totally ignored universal healthcare. So, maybe she was mildly progressive by modern democratic party standards. But honestly, she had to be dragged to the left with no guarantee of acting on it. She drew the lines of her limits of progressivism at some pretty big policies that mattered, and the second the pressure was off of her, she likely would have let her "private positions" take hold and not do crap.
Quite frankly, I think the only positions she was legitimately too left on was social issues, and even then, SOME social issues. She wasn't far enough left to me on abortion and gay marriage, and seemed reluctant and apologetic for supporting such things to me (her "private" position on the latter seemed to indicate a certain moral repugnance on embracing the issue). She was too far left though on identity politics and guns. On identity politics, the democrats were insufferable and repelled a lot of prospective voters. I already covered this. On guns, she basically wanted people to be able to sue firearm manufacturers for gun deaths. This would put gun manufacturers out of business and make getting firearms virtually impossible. Sanders was much more to the center on this and I think it would have played well with rural voters.
That said, to recap, the problem with Clinton, at least on economics, isn't that she was too far left. It was that she faked left when she was a centrist at heart and showed a significant amount of contempt for the left wing base. Let's not let the democrats revise history here. This is a common theme of theirs. They sabotaged McGovern, and then claimed the democratic party was too democratic and too far to the left. So the neoliberal centrists got control of the party, established superdelegates to keep the people down, and moved to the right ever since, simultaneously blaming left wing voters for their failures while refusing to seriously consider what they have to say.
Look, Clinton was a uniquely flawed candidate who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She would have made a fine president in 2008 when Obama ran, but in 2016, ain't nobody wants any of that. Half the democrats despise Clinton. She's too far to the center, too inconsistent on supporting liberal values, and has TONS of baggage and skeletons in her closet that alienate people from her. As Obama himself said in 2008, she'll say anything and change nothing. Don't you ever forget that. And on the right, people hate her too. They use every attack in the book against her, bring her down with tons of fake news and scandals, make mountains out of molehills, etc.
And that's why she lost. She tried to triangulate by appealing to the center while making a fake appeal to leftists while running to the center, and ended up losing core constituents she needed to win. Don't forget it. Don't let the democrats change the narrative. They'll say anything to justify their narrative that the democrats need to move to the right. And this is because they're part of the problem. Follow the money. Look at whom this policy shift benefits (hint, it's not lower classes). The establishment is entrenched, they don't want to give up power, so they're trying to gaslight us into believing this BS about how we can't move to the left. And then they sabotage any attempt to do so. Don't forget it.
No comments:
Post a Comment