Lets Discuss What went wrong with Bernie Sanders' campaign ?
- Thread starter Uno
- Start date
It's fair to say the 2016 team was better than 2020. It looks like the 2020 team was crowdsourced from the internet and carried with it the rhetoric and style of twitter warriors. There was a NYT article that looked at the difference between twitter democrats and other democrats and the results were striking, twitter democrats were more educated, younger, and liberal compared to the average Dem. 2018 should have also been a warning sign to them given how many suburbanites were turning Dem and they should have planned around that fact.
lol at all these pages. Yall, stop it. no one's campaign is perfect.
but we know easily how this happened. you have never in your life or your parents life seen the DNC form voltron at the request from the previous super well liked/loved president, while the mainstream media is pushing that same narrative the entire time.
we have never seen that before, and throw in clyburn too. for all that to happen all at once. it had to be game over. The only thing that could break that was if Bernie was a young black man with the same track record. anything else wasnt going to work. sorry but bernie is an old white guy with that same track record. not enough.
brick james
John piffington
No ones campaign is perfect, but some are terrible. Why the fukk would he still be preaching that underdog us vs the establishment shyt with the lead. Why would he not send a campaign surrogate to talk to Clyburn. It wasn't just the endorsement, Clyburn gave probably the best speech of the campaign cycle. I dont think any of us saw them all dropping out and coalescing behind Biden before ST, but the campaign clearly knew they had something to worry about when the polling indicated that the moderate vote was several times larger than Bernie's. Did Bernies campaign make any attempts to consolidate their support ? With high level staff and advisors talking shyt on social media deep into the primary season, I'm going to assume that the campaign did not have a conversation with Pete or Amy about getting their support. Look at that conciliatory tone they took with Warren's campaign after they took an ass whooping. Dont you think the time to start mending fences would've been with front runner status?
This thread is utterly AMAZING
Full thread: Thread by @gwensnyderPHL: Obviously I knew the dirtbags have been awful to post-Warren voters, but what's been truly wild this week is the number of 1) number of wome…
threadreaderapp.com
Thread by @gwensnyderPHL: Obviously I knew the dirtbags have been awful to post-Warren voters, but what's been truly wild this week is the number of 1) number of wome…
23-30 minutes
Obviously I knew the dirtbags have been awful to post-Warren voters, but what's been truly wild this week is the number of
1) number of women in my mentions being like "thank you, I'm Bernie-to-Warren now, being welcomed was what I needed," and
2) dirtbags THEN appearing to be like "yeah well you AREN'T welcome, you're evil for having supported Warren, we only want purists."
This literally in thr same threads where sometimes *the same dirtbags* are being like, "actually, we don't exist and don't do that."
Put that together with them turning around and telling the longtime Bernie supporters that their oppression doesn't matter and that talking about liberation is alienating to "potential voters," and it's really clear that dirtbags aren't actually looking to get Bernie elected.
As those new to the show may not be aware, my main gig right now is monitoring far right extremists, with a focus on accelerationist, pro-terror Nazis.
Accelerationists argue that our political house is on its way out anyway, and want to burn it down to speed things along.
Mask-off Nazis pretty much universally hate Donald Trump (the pro-Israel thing and Ivanka conversion stuff are not big selling points), but they're happy to have him re-elected for one main reason: he's sitting in a puddle of gasoline, playing with matches.
Now, one thing that has been iiiiiiiiinteresting to me as I've read through dirtbag brigading of my timeline in the past week is the number of dirtbags in my timeline being like "fukk liberal reformists, they're evil" and "I like Bernie cuz violent revolution."
There have always have been dogmatically purist revolution-now-or-bust circles on the left, but they usually interact with pragmatic left organizing by selling burn-it-down newspapers at the fringes of the our rallies and muttering about how armed struggle is the only struggle.
And the thing is, Bernie is running to win an election, and running to win a liberal democratic election is necessarily pragmatic *and* liberal.
Furthermore, his personal views are clearly reformist and in opposition to the strategy of violent revolution.
Now, it doesn't shock me that tankie dirtbags ("yay violent revolution/USSR" bois) are sincerely opposed to Bernie winning & trying to patrol purity in the movement around his election.
They think reform slows proletariat disillusionment slows "inevitable" violent revolution.
Tankies don't show up in reformist struggles (including elections) to win them; they show up to undermine them and recruit.
They aren't there to help Bernie succeed at reform.
What they want is either for him to lose or for his reform agenda to fail in office.
Once Bernie fails (electorally or at reformist measures) the tankies plan to show up and say to folks in passionate Berner circles, "hey wow huh, we gave it our best shot, but I guess now it's time to go to Plan B, which is violent rev."
(Always tankies' actual Plan A)
Tankies are by and large accelerationists, and their acceleration play here is to build a revolutionary energy-charged movement around Bernie that ultimately fails and in its anger and disillusionment becomes a ripe harvest ground for new converts to tankie-ism.
Their politics are *entirely* class-driven, and any pursuit of liberatory discussion around other aspects of oppression is 1) a distraction from class and 2) in their minds also fundamentally misguided, because to them any pre-revolution demands for reform just slow the rev.
Their Bernie strategy also hinges on the gullability of the Bernie base.
They really would like to co-opt the energy/numbers around Bernie wholesale, and that's hard to do when there are "normies" being like, "that sounds like a bad idea what if we just run another candidate"
*That* is why the tankies patrol purity and liberatory politics in the Bernie base and work to actively scare away Warren voters.
They aren't trying to build a critical mass of electorate to win an election, they're trying to build a co-option-vulnerable horde.
Now, plenty of folks I know and like take various positions on reformism and have various ideas about what revolution looks like, and I firmly believe what ultimately matters most in movement organizing is the values we hold, not who has the hottest theory take.
For example, some antifascists I work with think elections and reform are useless farces, & that doesn't make them not my movement comrades!
We disagree on theory.
But they share my values, we work together where there's strategic belief overlap, & don't where there isn't.
There are many problematic things about tankies, but the issue with the dirtbag tankie strategy on Bernie specifically is that it hinges on deceit, trickery, and manipilation.
They're covertly sabotaging the candidate they'll later claim they totally supported.
Like a lot of Nazi accelerationists, tankies aren't too concerned with *how* the house burns down.
These guys are dogma fanatics and tankie dogma is all about historical inevitablity.
They think it's a 110% sure thing that the rev will ultimately lead to Communism.
As a result, there are plenty of tankies who are willing to work with the Nazis/fash to burn shyt down, because they "know" Communism will prevail as long as they just get this damn fire started eventually.
Those collaborations are called red-brown alliances.
I'll get back to tankies in a minute, but first let's get back to the other and more populated major contingent of the dirtbag left: self-pitying white dudes mad that their expected privilege pay-outs never happened and looking for a cause to enable their white male victimhood.
Say hello to a tankie and they will say NO TIME FOR THAT HERE IS MY 900-PAGE STALINIST TREATISE DID U KNOW NORTH KOREA IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR PEOPLE.
There are many things you can say about tankies, but "under-read on their own propaganda" ain't one.
The white male victimhood crowd, on the other hand, grew up very much confident that as white men from professional class families, they would be guaranteed fawning white women & automatic economic security & would be perfectly content had those privilege entitlements manifested.
They're millennials and young-to-mid-Gen Xers, by and large stuck in careers that stalled (or failed to launch) as a result of the last recession.
They call themselves "left," but they tend towards intellectual laziness and have very little understanding of leftism or movement.
If your contact with these dudes is limited, and/or if leftism isn't your jam, it's easy to mistake them for real leftists because a) that's what they call themselves, & b) they're in these dirtbag circles with tankies & will brainlessly parrot tankie talking points to look edgy.
In truth, though, podcasts and reddit tend to be pretty much their only exposure to any aspect of the left, and there's zero cognizance of the different and distinctive regions of thought in leftism.
It's a lifestyle brand to them, one they think allows them to play victim.
You can see this kind of resistance to actual critical thought (really, thinking, period) in Breadtube's queerphobic rants about "queers with 30-tweet threads" or Vaush's 38-minute Youtube video of inchoate rage at the fact that my tweeted critique of dirtbags was too long.
These guys don't read books or essays. They get uncontrollably mad when a Twitter thread is too long, ffs.
They aren't here to do actual work, either. These guys aren't phonebanking/canvassing for Bernie.
Bernie is just a brand they bought, a fanclub they joined.
The appeal of this brand to them isn't moral or actually hardship-rooted.
Its about the edginess, its non-normieness, and their belief that what class-based critique and socialism are *really* about is the fact that they were cheated out of their white dude privilege birthright.
To them, the brand is *about* outsidership.
For the most part, they're less successful than expected but doing relatively okay and have a deep parental support network to fall back on.
They don't have any actual skin in the game.
The fact that a Bernie win would likely be immaterial to their lived situation (at least, relative to the life-changing impact his policies might have for the actual oppressed) means they have no actual self-interest in him actually winning.
In fact, Bernie winning the title of highest level of mainstream acceptance in the land would mean only one thing to them: a mortal threat to the lifestyle brand they've come to define themselves by and justify their sense of male victimhood with.
I don't actually tend to think this is a conscious fear in their minds, but I do think the fact that these guys aggressively discourage other, "impure" voters from going Bernie is a behavior that rewlly tells on itself.
At the very least, these guys don't care about winning.
Like rich people whining about chavs in Burberry hats and fanboys who want you to know they liked the band before it sold out, what they are primarily concerned about patrolling the boundaries of a lifestyle brand that defines them, "protecting" it from dilution.
Because (in their minds) this is a brand defined largely by straight, cis white male victimhood, they are actively hostile to women, POC, trans folks, and anyone else who dares remind them that this is an intersectional movement grounded in work we did long before they arrived.
That attitude is more than fine by "class liberation through revolution is the only liberation there is" tankies, who are more than happy to provide them with class-reductionist lines to justify that brand-policing.
In fact, it's a tankie recruitment point.
At the same time all this centering of white male victimhood is going on, there are fash buzzards circling the encampment, sometimes actively encouraged by enabler crypto-fascists like the hosts of Red Scare and Amber Frost of Chapo Traphouse.
Nazism isn't necessarily even particularly new to a certain contingent of these dirtbag dudes; there is a fair chunk of them that openly talks about being "saved" by Chapo from the toxic Nazi hellsoup of ***** (often in the context of, "feminists better shut up or I'll go back")
These aren't hardocre leftists looking for a political revolution.
They're self-pitying white dudes desperate for a club to join that will explain their alienation from society, coddle their sense of cis white male victimhood, & give them cover to take anger on oppressed people.
They think the Bernie supporter world will give them that, plus a socially acceptable cover story for engaging in that kind of behavior.
(Frankly, Jeff fukking Weaver has worked his damnedest to try and get Bernie to cater to that impression, and I will have a lot to say about the comic book guy who tried to make this campaign a Comic Book Guy convention during post-mortem, but I digress)
The reality is, though, the Bernie supporter world and electorate is not a bunch of Comic Book Guys adoringly enabled by shrinking violet girlfriends.
The ACTUAL fukking movement is full of people in this for liberatory reasons and who ACTUALLY want him to win.
That doesn't bode well for the longterm success of the dirtbag left as a holding chamber for all the white male victimhood dirtbag "leftists" who expect to have their tantrums catered to forever.
First and foremost, a whole lot of us within this movement are extremely tired of their bullshyt, clear that our internal call-outs of them have not been working, and are doing the thankless but necessary work of publicly saying, if you aren't accountable to our values, gtfo.
Second, there's no clear path for them in the aftermath.
These aren't irl joiners, and even online, national DSA has *some* limits when it comes to actual, overt racism/sexism (they much prefer it to be cloaked in class reductionism).
Savior-based white male victimhood outsiderism cults only work when your candidate is an outsider.
When your candidate gets elected, they aren't an outsider like you anymore.
They're an insider like the rest of the normies.
We saw this happen with Trump and the alt-right.
Remember Richard Spencer sieg heiling and claiming victory in DC after his inauguration?
Yeah, not so much anymore.
White male outsiderism cults are all about explaining their members' outsiderism as undeserved victimhood.
Incels don't worship members of theirs that manage to get laid; their "saints" are mass-murderers.
Accelerationist Nazi victimhood chats don't canonize Trump; they canonize defeated "martyrs" like Hitler and the Christchurch shooter.
None of those far right dudes really tend to care all that much for theory or intellectual underpinnings, either.
They aren't scholars or idealists.
They're hateful people alienated from society and looking to explain why their alienation is someone else's fault.
The dirtbag cult is a white dude victimhood and outsiderism built around a fictionalized version of Bernie Sanders they created in their own image.
If Bernie wins, that cult falls apart. You can't hood together an outsiderism cult when it centers an elected president.
If Bernie loses, there's no clear left replacement for their outsiderism posterchild, and no electoral energy to draw upon.
And since these are not people who actually believe in or respect leftist theory or values, they aren't just going to stick around just for the cause.
Either way, the non-tankie dirtbags end up unmoored, bitter, and still plenty angry and alienated.
Which, as you may recall, is the stage the tankies showed up eager for in the first place.
As far as the tankies are concerned, my attitude is basically, meh, they can have 'em, good luck getting dirtbags off their asses to pamphlet.
Tankies are really fukking annoying but, in my experience, usually pretty harmless.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
Full thread: Thread by @gwensnyderPHL: Obviously I knew the dirtbags have been awful to post-Warren voters, but what's been truly wild this week is the number of 1) number of wome…
threadreaderapp.com
Thread by @gwensnyderPHL: Obviously I knew the dirtbags have been awful to post-Warren voters, but what's been truly wild this week is the number of 1) number of wome…
23-30 minutes
Obviously I knew the dirtbags have been awful to post-Warren voters, but what's been truly wild this week is the number of
1) number of women in my mentions being like "thank you, I'm Bernie-to-Warren now, being welcomed was what I needed," and
2) dirtbags THEN appearing to be like "yeah well you AREN'T welcome, you're evil for having supported Warren, we only want purists."
This literally in thr same threads where sometimes *the same dirtbags* are being like, "actually, we don't exist and don't do that."
Put that together with them turning around and telling the longtime Bernie supporters that their oppression doesn't matter and that talking about liberation is alienating to "potential voters," and it's really clear that dirtbags aren't actually looking to get Bernie elected.
As those new to the show may not be aware, my main gig right now is monitoring far right extremists, with a focus on accelerationist, pro-terror Nazis.
Accelerationists argue that our political house is on its way out anyway, and want to burn it down to speed things along.
Mask-off Nazis pretty much universally hate Donald Trump (the pro-Israel thing and Ivanka conversion stuff are not big selling points), but they're happy to have him re-elected for one main reason: he's sitting in a puddle of gasoline, playing with matches.
Now, one thing that has been iiiiiiiiinteresting to me as I've read through dirtbag brigading of my timeline in the past week is the number of dirtbags in my timeline being like "fukk liberal reformists, they're evil" and "I like Bernie cuz violent revolution."
There have always have been dogmatically purist revolution-now-or-bust circles on the left, but they usually interact with pragmatic left organizing by selling burn-it-down newspapers at the fringes of the our rallies and muttering about how armed struggle is the only struggle.
And the thing is, Bernie is running to win an election, and running to win a liberal democratic election is necessarily pragmatic *and* liberal.
Furthermore, his personal views are clearly reformist and in opposition to the strategy of violent revolution.
Now, it doesn't shock me that tankie dirtbags ("yay violent revolution/USSR" bois) are sincerely opposed to Bernie winning & trying to patrol purity in the movement around his election.
They think reform slows proletariat disillusionment slows "inevitable" violent revolution.
Tankies don't show up in reformist struggles (including elections) to win them; they show up to undermine them and recruit.
They aren't there to help Bernie succeed at reform.
What they want is either for him to lose or for his reform agenda to fail in office.
Once Bernie fails (electorally or at reformist measures) the tankies plan to show up and say to folks in passionate Berner circles, "hey wow huh, we gave it our best shot, but I guess now it's time to go to Plan B, which is violent rev."
(Always tankies' actual Plan A)
Tankies are by and large accelerationists, and their acceleration play here is to build a revolutionary energy-charged movement around Bernie that ultimately fails and in its anger and disillusionment becomes a ripe harvest ground for new converts to tankie-ism.
Their politics are *entirely* class-driven, and any pursuit of liberatory discussion around other aspects of oppression is 1) a distraction from class and 2) in their minds also fundamentally misguided, because to them any pre-revolution demands for reform just slow the rev.
Their Bernie strategy also hinges on the gullability of the Bernie base.
They really would like to co-opt the energy/numbers around Bernie wholesale, and that's hard to do when there are "normies" being like, "that sounds like a bad idea what if we just run another candidate"
*That* is why the tankies patrol purity and liberatory politics in the Bernie base and work to actively scare away Warren voters.
They aren't trying to build a critical mass of electorate to win an election, they're trying to build a co-option-vulnerable horde.
Now, plenty of folks I know and like take various positions on reformism and have various ideas about what revolution looks like, and I firmly believe what ultimately matters most in movement organizing is the values we hold, not who has the hottest theory take.
For example, some antifascists I work with think elections and reform are useless farces, & that doesn't make them not my movement comrades!
We disagree on theory.
But they share my values, we work together where there's strategic belief overlap, & don't where there isn't.
There are many problematic things about tankies, but the issue with the dirtbag tankie strategy on Bernie specifically is that it hinges on deceit, trickery, and manipilation.
They're covertly sabotaging the candidate they'll later claim they totally supported.
Like a lot of Nazi accelerationists, tankies aren't too concerned with *how* the house burns down.
These guys are dogma fanatics and tankie dogma is all about historical inevitablity.
They think it's a 110% sure thing that the rev will ultimately lead to Communism.
As a result, there are plenty of tankies who are willing to work with the Nazis/fash to burn shyt down, because they "know" Communism will prevail as long as they just get this damn fire started eventually.
Those collaborations are called red-brown alliances.
I'll get back to tankies in a minute, but first let's get back to the other and more populated major contingent of the dirtbag left: self-pitying white dudes mad that their expected privilege pay-outs never happened and looking for a cause to enable their white male victimhood.
Say hello to a tankie and they will say NO TIME FOR THAT HERE IS MY 900-PAGE STALINIST TREATISE DID U KNOW NORTH KOREA IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR PEOPLE.
There are many things you can say about tankies, but "under-read on their own propaganda" ain't one.
The white male victimhood crowd, on the other hand, grew up very much confident that as white men from professional class families, they would be guaranteed fawning white women & automatic economic security & would be perfectly content had those privilege entitlements manifested.
They're millennials and young-to-mid-Gen Xers, by and large stuck in careers that stalled (or failed to launch) as a result of the last recession.
They call themselves "left," but they tend towards intellectual laziness and have very little understanding of leftism or movement.
If your contact with these dudes is limited, and/or if leftism isn't your jam, it's easy to mistake them for real leftists because a) that's what they call themselves, & b) they're in these dirtbag circles with tankies & will brainlessly parrot tankie talking points to look edgy.
In truth, though, podcasts and reddit tend to be pretty much their only exposure to any aspect of the left, and there's zero cognizance of the different and distinctive regions of thought in leftism.
It's a lifestyle brand to them, one they think allows them to play victim.
You can see this kind of resistance to actual critical thought (really, thinking, period) in Breadtube's queerphobic rants about "queers with 30-tweet threads" or Vaush's 38-minute Youtube video of inchoate rage at the fact that my tweeted critique of dirtbags was too long.
These guys don't read books or essays. They get uncontrollably mad when a Twitter thread is too long, ffs.
They aren't here to do actual work, either. These guys aren't phonebanking/canvassing for Bernie.
Bernie is just a brand they bought, a fanclub they joined.
The appeal of this brand to them isn't moral or actually hardship-rooted.
Its about the edginess, its non-normieness, and their belief that what class-based critique and socialism are *really* about is the fact that they were cheated out of their white dude privilege birthright.
To them, the brand is *about* outsidership.
For the most part, they're less successful than expected but doing relatively okay and have a deep parental support network to fall back on.
They don't have any actual skin in the game.
The fact that a Bernie win would likely be immaterial to their lived situation (at least, relative to the life-changing impact his policies might have for the actual oppressed) means they have no actual self-interest in him actually winning.
In fact, Bernie winning the title of highest level of mainstream acceptance in the land would mean only one thing to them: a mortal threat to the lifestyle brand they've come to define themselves by and justify their sense of male victimhood with.
I don't actually tend to think this is a conscious fear in their minds, but I do think the fact that these guys aggressively discourage other, "impure" voters from going Bernie is a behavior that rewlly tells on itself.
At the very least, these guys don't care about winning.
Like rich people whining about chavs in Burberry hats and fanboys who want you to know they liked the band before it sold out, what they are primarily concerned about patrolling the boundaries of a lifestyle brand that defines them, "protecting" it from dilution.
Because (in their minds) this is a brand defined largely by straight, cis white male victimhood, they are actively hostile to women, POC, trans folks, and anyone else who dares remind them that this is an intersectional movement grounded in work we did long before they arrived.
That attitude is more than fine by "class liberation through revolution is the only liberation there is" tankies, who are more than happy to provide them with class-reductionist lines to justify that brand-policing.
In fact, it's a tankie recruitment point.
At the same time all this centering of white male victimhood is going on, there are fash buzzards circling the encampment, sometimes actively encouraged by enabler crypto-fascists like the hosts of Red Scare and Amber Frost of Chapo Traphouse.
Nazism isn't necessarily even particularly new to a certain contingent of these dirtbag dudes; there is a fair chunk of them that openly talks about being "saved" by Chapo from the toxic Nazi hellsoup of ***** (often in the context of, "feminists better shut up or I'll go back")
These aren't hardocre leftists looking for a political revolution.
They're self-pitying white dudes desperate for a club to join that will explain their alienation from society, coddle their sense of cis white male victimhood, & give them cover to take anger on oppressed people.
They think the Bernie supporter world will give them that, plus a socially acceptable cover story for engaging in that kind of behavior.
(Frankly, Jeff fukking Weaver has worked his damnedest to try and get Bernie to cater to that impression, and I will have a lot to say about the comic book guy who tried to make this campaign a Comic Book Guy convention during post-mortem, but I digress)
The reality is, though, the Bernie supporter world and electorate is not a bunch of Comic Book Guys adoringly enabled by shrinking violet girlfriends.
The ACTUAL fukking movement is full of people in this for liberatory reasons and who ACTUALLY want him to win.
That doesn't bode well for the longterm success of the dirtbag left as a holding chamber for all the white male victimhood dirtbag "leftists" who expect to have their tantrums catered to forever.
First and foremost, a whole lot of us within this movement are extremely tired of their bullshyt, clear that our internal call-outs of them have not been working, and are doing the thankless but necessary work of publicly saying, if you aren't accountable to our values, gtfo.
Second, there's no clear path for them in the aftermath.
These aren't irl joiners, and even online, national DSA has *some* limits when it comes to actual, overt racism/sexism (they much prefer it to be cloaked in class reductionism).
Savior-based white male victimhood outsiderism cults only work when your candidate is an outsider.
When your candidate gets elected, they aren't an outsider like you anymore.
They're an insider like the rest of the normies.
We saw this happen with Trump and the alt-right.
Remember Richard Spencer sieg heiling and claiming victory in DC after his inauguration?
Yeah, not so much anymore.
White male outsiderism cults are all about explaining their members' outsiderism as undeserved victimhood.
Incels don't worship members of theirs that manage to get laid; their "saints" are mass-murderers.
Accelerationist Nazi victimhood chats don't canonize Trump; they canonize defeated "martyrs" like Hitler and the Christchurch shooter.
None of those far right dudes really tend to care all that much for theory or intellectual underpinnings, either.
They aren't scholars or idealists.
They're hateful people alienated from society and looking to explain why their alienation is someone else's fault.
The dirtbag cult is a white dude victimhood and outsiderism built around a fictionalized version of Bernie Sanders they created in their own image.
If Bernie wins, that cult falls apart. You can't hood together an outsiderism cult when it centers an elected president.
If Bernie loses, there's no clear left replacement for their outsiderism posterchild, and no electoral energy to draw upon.
And since these are not people who actually believe in or respect leftist theory or values, they aren't just going to stick around just for the cause.
Either way, the non-tankie dirtbags end up unmoored, bitter, and still plenty angry and alienated.
Which, as you may recall, is the stage the tankies showed up eager for in the first place.
As far as the tankies are concerned, my attitude is basically, meh, they can have 'em, good luck getting dirtbags off their asses to pamphlet.
Tankies are really fukking annoying but, in my experience, usually pretty harmless.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
PART 2:
What I'm much more concerned about is the fash.
The tankies aren't the only ones scoping out the dirtbags and getting ready for dinner.
When dirtbag broadcasters "joke" about being crypto-fash and literally propose a "Red-bronze alliance," it's disingenuous irony in action.
I've written a lot about disingenuous irony with regard to Nazi fascists and the alt-reich.
Nazis know that they can't propagandize with phrases like "White Power" sincerely without scaring people away.
Instead, they introduce the concepts "ironically."
The most thorough and now-classic example of Nazi alt-reich disingenuously ironic propagandic strategy is the leaked Daily Stormer style guide.
It explicitly lays out the strategy of introducing concepts "ironically" in order to lay the groundwork for their unironic acceptance.
Basically, the style guide admits that openly Nazi stuff is scary and foreign to newcomers.
Instead, it advises writers to "jokingly" write through a Nazi lens until the underlying ideology and terms are familiar to the reader.
The reader can tell himself that this is just troll content to piss off the SJWs and consume the content "for the lulz."
Of course, though, it's still propagandic content selectively presenting Nazi arguments and examples meant to convince the reader.
The idea is to remove the shock value through repeat exposure and get the reader to the point of "lol at that edgy holocaust denial joking, but also the Nazis do some good points."
At that point, the convert starts getting comfortable reading the content unironically.
When Breadtube is like "yeah I know this is a right wing talking point but still," when Frost jokes about her fash-adjacent friends, when Kyachiyan claims to be crypto-fascist but not really even crypto, it isn't edgy absurdism.
It's grooming.
I can't speak to any of their heart of hearts.
It's unclear how much of this grooming is deliberate recruitment, and how much of it is them existing in a "left" subculture where edginess is fetishized, where being unafraid to spout fash shyt is super-un-P.C. coolgirl/coolboyism.
What I'm saying is, I'd have to listen to way too much dirtbag podcast to be sure whether these folks are deliberately recruiting through disingenuous irony, or just nitwitted & think these Nazi talking points are actually just fun irony.
Functionally, it doesn't matter.
Whether it's intentional or not, they are actively grooming these socially-alienated white dude dirtbags into famiarity with the propaganda and personalities and publications used to lure people to far right extremism, and that is REALLY REALLY BAD.
I wrote yesterday about the economies of emergent moments in movement.
One of the signature traits of these emergent moments is that opportunists see the spotlight, show up to stand in front of it, exploit it for money or fame, then disappear cash or fame runs out.
These opportunists come in two major forms: thieves and grifters.
Thieves strike while the iron is hot, then get out while the getting is good.
Grifters endear themselves to the least committed, earning their loyalty telling them what they want to hear.
Then, they exploit it.
They may exploit that loyalty for fame or respect or money or ego gratification.
Whatever their motive, their strategy is always
1) keep the movement shiny & exciting for as long as possible
2) preserve that loyalty at any cost, and
3) defang potentional competition for it.
These grifters understand intuitively that emergent moments don't last forever, and they do everything in their power to feed the fire and extract the maximum from it.
They know anger and controversy are firestokers, and that actual organizing threatens their dominance.
That's what we're seeing happen with these dirtbag broadcasters right now.
They're grifters trying to feed whatever they can to the fire and maximize the output of their grifting engine before the steam runs out and the fame and fortune start to fade.
It's absolutely in their interests to keep everyone thinking the emergent moment is the only movement there is, that it will last forever, and that the experienced movement leaders critiquing them are just jealous & bitter because they aren't rich and famous podcasters, too.
The grifters know the moment will end.
They encourage the trolling and provocation and outrageous fash-flirtation and violent rev talk not because it serves Bernie's candidacy, but because it stokes that grift-powering fire and keeps the fame & money production going full-blast.
It's amoral, self-serving, disingenuous exploitation of the labor of *actual* movement with no regard for how their behavior will effect people for whom this issues are life-or-death or what will happen when they leave.
It's late capitalism in its full vainglory.
When I was younger, I used to to be mad at these guys for siphoning off potential movement members.
As I've gotten older and wiser, I've realized that they're just siphoning unorganized energy, not potential comrades in liberation struggle.
The loyalists who follow grifters aren't looking to grow or do work.
They're not looking for a leader; they're looking for saviors who will promise to be the movement for them and yesmen who egg on and encourage their worst tendencies and validate their self-pity.
Now, Bernie never promised to be their savior, but that doesn't really matter.
The dirtbag broadcasters present their own fictionalized Bernie Daddy to their loyalists, then claim to be doing the egging-on and self-pity-validating in service of that imaginary candidate-savior.
The dirtbag broadcasters know that emergent moments fade.
They know that this is especially true when those moments are electoral, with buit-in expiration dates.
They've profited from two emergences, 2016 and 2020, but their clock is almost up.
We know what they'll do when this moment passes.
They'll extract as much as they can from the base they built, then move on to their next grift.
That's what grifters do.
So the question becomes, what happens to this remaining, unmoored, set of socially-alienated dirtbaggers whose anger club is dissipating rapidly?
Short answer is, nothing good.
The problem with grifter loyalists coming out of a fading emergent moment is that a good percentage formed an energy dependency & a need for victimhood-based belonging.
Some will go back to just being standard-issue dikks on reddit or *****, but for others that won't be enough.
What those others are going to want and crave-- going to jones for, really, as they come off that emergent moment high-- is the promise of a something-bigger-than-them that delivers a hard hit of rage paired with a validation of both their outsiderism and sense of victimhood.
The tankies can accommodate those needs to some extent, but for the most part they are far too marginal and far too low-energy to act as a comparable substitute.
These dirtbaggers are going to be looking to keep a rush going, not to debate Marx.
There is really only one logical place for the jones-ers to go, one place that will affirm their nihilistic rage and anger, nurture their inclination of hate of and their lashing out at the oppressed, and celebrate their alienation.
That place is the extremist far right.
As I've written before, this is a prediction rooted in experience, not idle speculation.
After Occupy, the grifters disappeared, would up on the left once in a while for smaller emergences and grift off them, then disappear again.
The rage and energy addicts?
Some of the ones I know kicked the habit, but others went hard far right, showing up every now and again on my Facebook timeline or in some post-Occupy space in Philly saying some wildly sexist or racist shyt or spouting far-right conspiracy theory.
Some Occupy rage addicts went on to become full-on Nazi figures and celebrities.
The notorious former Occupier Weev helped found and run Daily Stormer.
Jason Kessler, the creator of the deadly Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, is also an Occupy alum.
Deescalating the dirtbag situation through accountability work isn't just a way to counter the incredibly toxic and detrimental effects that dirtbags have had on Bernie's nomination chances (though it certainly is that as well).
It's about harm reduction.
These dirtbag broadcasters aren't just hurting Bernie's shot at the nomination by alienating would-be Bernie voters.
They're damaging our movement by injecting toxic hatefulness into the left, and they're grooming these toxic a$$holes for enrollment in Nazi Academy.
This isn't just about helping Bernie.
It's about doing what we are morally obligated to do to protect our longterm movement and obstruct a developing potential Nazi recruitment pipeline.
Bernie supporter comrades and actual committed leftists, this shyt is being done in our name.
Our silence on this shyt is complacency, and complacency is a choice that is not easily forgiven.
The movement for liberation will pay the price on this if we do not act.
This burden rests disproportionately on those of us with privilege, those of us who, wholly or relatively speaking, have voices that oppressive hegemony amplifies, those of us who risk the least in terms of retraumatization when the inevitable, hateful dirtbag bridgade strikes.
Trust and believe, I am paying attention to all the leaders and organizers I see aboard the Bernie Express and Leftism Local to see who lives our values, to see which big talkers turn out to experience failures in courage when it's time to put their money where their mouth is.
Trust and believe that a whole lot of other women are paying just as much attention and will adjust their levels of trust in and respect for you as a result.
I'm taking this stand in part because so many women have told me as much, and I want to be accountable to them, too.
Trust and believe, many of those women are unlikely to tell you this unless they think they can trust you.
Trust and believe, if you lose their trust on this, they may lose so much trust in you that they'll never trust you again or tell you at all.
Trust and believe that whether or not you hear about them, those judgments will still be made and those judgments will be lasting.
Trusting relationships are the foundational bedrock of movement.
Trust hinges on the shared belief that we have each other's back.
Stay complacent about these dirtbags, you destroy that trust, hurt our movement, and enable Nazi recruitment that will hurt us all doubly.
Or.
Do the hard and courageous work of standing up to the destructive dirtbag a$$holes who are hurting our longterm movement, priming their followers to join a Nazi movement that would have us dead, and hurting our candidate to boot.
It's your choice.
The end.
Sorry, duh, typo-- Warren-to-Bernie
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
What I'm much more concerned about is the fash.
The tankies aren't the only ones scoping out the dirtbags and getting ready for dinner.
When dirtbag broadcasters "joke" about being crypto-fash and literally propose a "Red-bronze alliance," it's disingenuous irony in action.
I've written a lot about disingenuous irony with regard to Nazi fascists and the alt-reich.
Nazis know that they can't propagandize with phrases like "White Power" sincerely without scaring people away.
Instead, they introduce the concepts "ironically."
The most thorough and now-classic example of Nazi alt-reich disingenuously ironic propagandic strategy is the leaked Daily Stormer style guide.
It explicitly lays out the strategy of introducing concepts "ironically" in order to lay the groundwork for their unironic acceptance.
Basically, the style guide admits that openly Nazi stuff is scary and foreign to newcomers.
Instead, it advises writers to "jokingly" write through a Nazi lens until the underlying ideology and terms are familiar to the reader.
The reader can tell himself that this is just troll content to piss off the SJWs and consume the content "for the lulz."
Of course, though, it's still propagandic content selectively presenting Nazi arguments and examples meant to convince the reader.
The idea is to remove the shock value through repeat exposure and get the reader to the point of "lol at that edgy holocaust denial joking, but also the Nazis do some good points."
At that point, the convert starts getting comfortable reading the content unironically.
When Breadtube is like "yeah I know this is a right wing talking point but still," when Frost jokes about her fash-adjacent friends, when Kyachiyan claims to be crypto-fascist but not really even crypto, it isn't edgy absurdism.
It's grooming.
I can't speak to any of their heart of hearts.
It's unclear how much of this grooming is deliberate recruitment, and how much of it is them existing in a "left" subculture where edginess is fetishized, where being unafraid to spout fash shyt is super-un-P.C. coolgirl/coolboyism.
What I'm saying is, I'd have to listen to way too much dirtbag podcast to be sure whether these folks are deliberately recruiting through disingenuous irony, or just nitwitted & think these Nazi talking points are actually just fun irony.
Functionally, it doesn't matter.
Whether it's intentional or not, they are actively grooming these socially-alienated white dude dirtbags into famiarity with the propaganda and personalities and publications used to lure people to far right extremism, and that is REALLY REALLY BAD.
I wrote yesterday about the economies of emergent moments in movement.
One of the signature traits of these emergent moments is that opportunists see the spotlight, show up to stand in front of it, exploit it for money or fame, then disappear cash or fame runs out.
These opportunists come in two major forms: thieves and grifters.
Thieves strike while the iron is hot, then get out while the getting is good.
Grifters endear themselves to the least committed, earning their loyalty telling them what they want to hear.
Then, they exploit it.
They may exploit that loyalty for fame or respect or money or ego gratification.
Whatever their motive, their strategy is always
1) keep the movement shiny & exciting for as long as possible
2) preserve that loyalty at any cost, and
3) defang potentional competition for it.
These grifters understand intuitively that emergent moments don't last forever, and they do everything in their power to feed the fire and extract the maximum from it.
They know anger and controversy are firestokers, and that actual organizing threatens their dominance.
That's what we're seeing happen with these dirtbag broadcasters right now.
They're grifters trying to feed whatever they can to the fire and maximize the output of their grifting engine before the steam runs out and the fame and fortune start to fade.
It's absolutely in their interests to keep everyone thinking the emergent moment is the only movement there is, that it will last forever, and that the experienced movement leaders critiquing them are just jealous & bitter because they aren't rich and famous podcasters, too.
The grifters know the moment will end.
They encourage the trolling and provocation and outrageous fash-flirtation and violent rev talk not because it serves Bernie's candidacy, but because it stokes that grift-powering fire and keeps the fame & money production going full-blast.
It's amoral, self-serving, disingenuous exploitation of the labor of *actual* movement with no regard for how their behavior will effect people for whom this issues are life-or-death or what will happen when they leave.
It's late capitalism in its full vainglory.
When I was younger, I used to to be mad at these guys for siphoning off potential movement members.
As I've gotten older and wiser, I've realized that they're just siphoning unorganized energy, not potential comrades in liberation struggle.
The loyalists who follow grifters aren't looking to grow or do work.
They're not looking for a leader; they're looking for saviors who will promise to be the movement for them and yesmen who egg on and encourage their worst tendencies and validate their self-pity.
Now, Bernie never promised to be their savior, but that doesn't really matter.
The dirtbag broadcasters present their own fictionalized Bernie Daddy to their loyalists, then claim to be doing the egging-on and self-pity-validating in service of that imaginary candidate-savior.
The dirtbag broadcasters know that emergent moments fade.
They know that this is especially true when those moments are electoral, with buit-in expiration dates.
They've profited from two emergences, 2016 and 2020, but their clock is almost up.
We know what they'll do when this moment passes.
They'll extract as much as they can from the base they built, then move on to their next grift.
That's what grifters do.
So the question becomes, what happens to this remaining, unmoored, set of socially-alienated dirtbaggers whose anger club is dissipating rapidly?
Short answer is, nothing good.
The problem with grifter loyalists coming out of a fading emergent moment is that a good percentage formed an energy dependency & a need for victimhood-based belonging.
Some will go back to just being standard-issue dikks on reddit or *****, but for others that won't be enough.
What those others are going to want and crave-- going to jones for, really, as they come off that emergent moment high-- is the promise of a something-bigger-than-them that delivers a hard hit of rage paired with a validation of both their outsiderism and sense of victimhood.
The tankies can accommodate those needs to some extent, but for the most part they are far too marginal and far too low-energy to act as a comparable substitute.
These dirtbaggers are going to be looking to keep a rush going, not to debate Marx.
There is really only one logical place for the jones-ers to go, one place that will affirm their nihilistic rage and anger, nurture their inclination of hate of and their lashing out at the oppressed, and celebrate their alienation.
That place is the extremist far right.
As I've written before, this is a prediction rooted in experience, not idle speculation.
After Occupy, the grifters disappeared, would up on the left once in a while for smaller emergences and grift off them, then disappear again.
The rage and energy addicts?
Some of the ones I know kicked the habit, but others went hard far right, showing up every now and again on my Facebook timeline or in some post-Occupy space in Philly saying some wildly sexist or racist shyt or spouting far-right conspiracy theory.
Some Occupy rage addicts went on to become full-on Nazi figures and celebrities.
The notorious former Occupier Weev helped found and run Daily Stormer.
Jason Kessler, the creator of the deadly Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, is also an Occupy alum.
Deescalating the dirtbag situation through accountability work isn't just a way to counter the incredibly toxic and detrimental effects that dirtbags have had on Bernie's nomination chances (though it certainly is that as well).
It's about harm reduction.
These dirtbag broadcasters aren't just hurting Bernie's shot at the nomination by alienating would-be Bernie voters.
They're damaging our movement by injecting toxic hatefulness into the left, and they're grooming these toxic a$$holes for enrollment in Nazi Academy.
This isn't just about helping Bernie.
It's about doing what we are morally obligated to do to protect our longterm movement and obstruct a developing potential Nazi recruitment pipeline.
Bernie supporter comrades and actual committed leftists, this shyt is being done in our name.
Our silence on this shyt is complacency, and complacency is a choice that is not easily forgiven.
The movement for liberation will pay the price on this if we do not act.
This burden rests disproportionately on those of us with privilege, those of us who, wholly or relatively speaking, have voices that oppressive hegemony amplifies, those of us who risk the least in terms of retraumatization when the inevitable, hateful dirtbag bridgade strikes.
Trust and believe, I am paying attention to all the leaders and organizers I see aboard the Bernie Express and Leftism Local to see who lives our values, to see which big talkers turn out to experience failures in courage when it's time to put their money where their mouth is.
Trust and believe that a whole lot of other women are paying just as much attention and will adjust their levels of trust in and respect for you as a result.
I'm taking this stand in part because so many women have told me as much, and I want to be accountable to them, too.
Trust and believe, many of those women are unlikely to tell you this unless they think they can trust you.
Trust and believe, if you lose their trust on this, they may lose so much trust in you that they'll never trust you again or tell you at all.
Trust and believe that whether or not you hear about them, those judgments will still be made and those judgments will be lasting.
Trusting relationships are the foundational bedrock of movement.
Trust hinges on the shared belief that we have each other's back.
Stay complacent about these dirtbags, you destroy that trust, hurt our movement, and enable Nazi recruitment that will hurt us all doubly.
Or.
Do the hard and courageous work of standing up to the destructive dirtbag a$$holes who are hurting our longterm movement, priming their followers to join a Nazi movement that would have us dead, and hurting our candidate to boot.
It's your choice.
The end.
Sorry, duh, typo-- Warren-to-Bernie
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
Looks like AOC shytted on Bernie 
Progressive Ideas Remain Popular. Progressive Presidential Candidates Are Losing. Why?
Progressive Ideas Remain Popular. Progressive Presidential Candidates Are Losing. Why?
By Astead W. Herndon
Updated 2:56 p.m. ET
In state after state, voters say they support liberal policies like single-payer health care, canceling student debt and the Green New Deal. But many are voting for Joe Biden, who has proposed largely moderate ideas.
Supporters of “Medicare for all” rallied outside the Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., last month.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
This was supposed to be the presidential primary race in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party put it all together. The left was coming for power, not only moral victories. One popular podcast promised that the party’s moderates would soon “bend the knee,” as working Americans flocked to a left-wing presidential agenda.
But after a disastrous month of electoral drubbings that continued with Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona, Florida and Illinois, it has become clear that the presidential promises of political revolution and big structural change will once again have to wait.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is not just beating liberal rivals, all but vanquishing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and outlasting Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. His candidacy has poked significant holes in the strategy of their wing of political thought.
Their big investments in organizing could not overcome his name recognition. They could not reshape the primary electorate, while Mr. Biden has surged among more moderate voters in Democratic suburbs. They could not cut into his advantage with black voters. And they could not overcome his electability argument — that he is the best candidate to defeat President Trump — as evidenced by the fact that Mr. Biden bested Mr. Sanders with many liberal voters in Florida on Tuesday.
Mr. Biden is also succeeding even as progressive policies such as single-payer health care, robust action on climate change and student debt cancellation continue to poll high among Democratic voters, drawing majority support in some states.
This disconnect, in which policies are popular but the candidates who advocate them are losing, has frustrated progressive groups. They privately split blame among themselves, the candidates they backed and a Democratic electorate that has prioritized fear of losing to President Trump above all other concerns.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading progressive and a top surrogate for Mr. Sanders, said in an interview that her wing of the party needed to learn “political lessons” from this race.
Asked for examples, she said that reaching suburban women and older black voters, groups progressive presidential candidates have struggled to win over, may require different political tactics.
“There’s so much emphasis on making outreach as conflict-based as possible,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “And sometimes I even feel miscast and understood. Because it’s about what tools you use, and conflict is one tool but not the only tool.”
She said candidates did not have to choose between class-first politics and addressing racial inequities, but that they must articulate the interplay between them.
“Intersectionality isn’t about virtue-signaling or wokeness, it’s about how we build a majority in progressive Democratic politics,” she added. “If folks have bad racial justice frames, or gender justice frames, or identity frames, you won’t go anywhere in expanding the party.”
Mr. Biden has succeeded even in states where voters have voiced support for progressive proposals. As Mr. Biden triumphed in Florida on Tuesday night, more than 70 percent of the state’s voters interviewed by AP VoteCast, a survey of the American electorate, said they favored replacing private health insurance with a “Medicare for all”-type system, the single-payer health care plan that has been the signature issue of Mr. Sanders’s campaign.
Big investments in organizing by progressive candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders could not overcome the name recognition of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Exit polls in Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri and Washington, all of which had primaries last Tuesday, showed that the majority of Democrats in each state backed Medicare for all. Common Dreams, the progressive website, tallied 20 states in a row where voters said they supported Medicare for all over private insurance in exit polls. Still, Mr. Biden has cruised to victory in many of them.
Matt Morrison, executive director of the labor organization Working America, said left-wing Democrats told themselves a faulty story — that winning the policy argument was the foremost way to build a political coalition. But doing so also requires building trust with voters, he said, because most Americans “look and ask, ‘Are they going to win over voters that aren’t like me or don’t care about politics?’”
“The self-branded progressive wing has to go beyond just the policy that fits the needs of the community,” he added. “Voters see that clearly. They’re making judgments about the whole person.”
There is cause for optimism among some on the left, given that issues that were once considered fringe are now popular.
In Illinois on Tuesday, Marie Newman, a progressive challenger supported by insurgent groups like the Justice Democrats, defeated an eight-term Democratic incumbent in the U.S. House of Representatives who opposed abortion.
And Mr. Biden has embraced some ideas in the past week that were championed by Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, including Ms. Warren’s bankruptcy plan and a proposal to make public college free for some students.
But others will forever rue a missed, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, presidential opportunity to define a Democratic Party going forward, and question if Mr. Biden’s current outreach efforts will continue.
After months of mocking Mr. Biden as a feckless front-runner, they acknowledge he managed to make the most important argument to Democrats: that his perceived ability to beat Mr. Trump should be valued over any policy in particular.
When Mr. Biden won her home state, Washington, in a belated race call this week, Representative Pramila Jayapal, who has endorsed Mr. Sanders and is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, “It’s clear that Washingtonians are ready and eager to turn the page on Donald Trump’s presidency.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez argued that Mr. Biden’s “electability” framework had dominated voters’ thoughts and press coverage, creating difficulties for both the female candidates in the primary race and the insurgent progressives.
“It wasn’t just ‘Can a woman win?’ but ‘Can a woman win against Trump in Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Pennsylvania,’” she said. “There was also the electability of the progressive movement. ‘Can single-payer health care win? I want it! But can it win?’”
And it is not just that Mr. Biden is winning, but how Mr. Sanders is losing: The Vermont senator has not won a single county in Florida, Michigan, Mississippi or Missouri.
The results are humbling for his allies, who entered the race oozing confidence. When Mr. Sanders led the field in fund-raising, they boasted of a national movement. When Ms. Warren was leading in polls and her policy ideas were dominating the conversation, they gloated that progressives did not have one presidential front-runner, but two.
But early victories by Mr. Sanders in New Hampshire and Nevada would soon run into a moderate buzz saw. Black voters in South Carolina embraced Mr. Biden, making clear to moderate Democrats across the country that the former vice president was their best hope at the nomination.
What happened next was the stuff of movies, as several of Mr. Biden’s former rivals dropped out and endorsed him, consolidating their ideological support, sending a powerful signal to voters across the country and propelling him to victories on Super Tuesday. In a mere 72 hours, he went from wounded candidate seeking a lifeline to front-runner with a delegate lead he is unlikely to surrender.
It is that window of time that has left progressives licking their political wounds.
In a speech on Tuesday evening after the results were announced in Florida and Illinois, Mr. Biden sought to appeal to younger voters, one of the few groups that progressives are still winning.
“Let me say especially to the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders, I hear you” Mr. Biden said. “I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do.”
Sean McElwee, the co-founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said the left’s vulnerability was in some ways self-inflicted; since Mr. Sanders’s first presidential campaign in 2016, he said, progressives have not focused enough on persuading mainstream Democrats to support their cause.
“By refusing to acknowledge persuasion, we leave ourselves out of part of the equation,” he said. “For progressives to have a seat at the table, we have to start speaking in the language that people are actually thinking in.”
Mr. Sanders has yet to comment on Tuesday’s results, and his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said on Wednesday morning that the senator would be “having conversations with supporters to assess his campaign.”
It is a stark contrast to what progressive leaders were saying in May, when their message to those who warned of Mr. Biden’s durability was to wait and see.
“This is what we’re going to test,” Mr. Shakir said at the time. “Where are people at?”
Not, evidently, with Mr. Sanders.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
Progressive Ideas Remain Popular. Progressive Presidential Candidates Are Losing. Why?
Progressive Ideas Remain Popular. Progressive Presidential Candidates Are Losing. Why?
By Astead W. Herndon
Updated 2:56 p.m. ET
In state after state, voters say they support liberal policies like single-payer health care, canceling student debt and the Green New Deal. But many are voting for Joe Biden, who has proposed largely moderate ideas.
Supporters of “Medicare for all” rallied outside the Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., last month.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
This was supposed to be the presidential primary race in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party put it all together. The left was coming for power, not only moral victories. One popular podcast promised that the party’s moderates would soon “bend the knee,” as working Americans flocked to a left-wing presidential agenda.
But after a disastrous month of electoral drubbings that continued with Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona, Florida and Illinois, it has become clear that the presidential promises of political revolution and big structural change will once again have to wait.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is not just beating liberal rivals, all but vanquishing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and outlasting Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. His candidacy has poked significant holes in the strategy of their wing of political thought.
Their big investments in organizing could not overcome his name recognition. They could not reshape the primary electorate, while Mr. Biden has surged among more moderate voters in Democratic suburbs. They could not cut into his advantage with black voters. And they could not overcome his electability argument — that he is the best candidate to defeat President Trump — as evidenced by the fact that Mr. Biden bested Mr. Sanders with many liberal voters in Florida on Tuesday.
Mr. Biden is also succeeding even as progressive policies such as single-payer health care, robust action on climate change and student debt cancellation continue to poll high among Democratic voters, drawing majority support in some states.
This disconnect, in which policies are popular but the candidates who advocate them are losing, has frustrated progressive groups. They privately split blame among themselves, the candidates they backed and a Democratic electorate that has prioritized fear of losing to President Trump above all other concerns.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading progressive and a top surrogate for Mr. Sanders, said in an interview that her wing of the party needed to learn “political lessons” from this race.
Asked for examples, she said that reaching suburban women and older black voters, groups progressive presidential candidates have struggled to win over, may require different political tactics.
“There’s so much emphasis on making outreach as conflict-based as possible,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “And sometimes I even feel miscast and understood. Because it’s about what tools you use, and conflict is one tool but not the only tool.”
She said candidates did not have to choose between class-first politics and addressing racial inequities, but that they must articulate the interplay between them.
“Intersectionality isn’t about virtue-signaling or wokeness, it’s about how we build a majority in progressive Democratic politics,” she added. “If folks have bad racial justice frames, or gender justice frames, or identity frames, you won’t go anywhere in expanding the party.”
Mr. Biden has succeeded even in states where voters have voiced support for progressive proposals. As Mr. Biden triumphed in Florida on Tuesday night, more than 70 percent of the state’s voters interviewed by AP VoteCast, a survey of the American electorate, said they favored replacing private health insurance with a “Medicare for all”-type system, the single-payer health care plan that has been the signature issue of Mr. Sanders’s campaign.
Big investments in organizing by progressive candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders could not overcome the name recognition of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Exit polls in Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri and Washington, all of which had primaries last Tuesday, showed that the majority of Democrats in each state backed Medicare for all. Common Dreams, the progressive website, tallied 20 states in a row where voters said they supported Medicare for all over private insurance in exit polls. Still, Mr. Biden has cruised to victory in many of them.
Matt Morrison, executive director of the labor organization Working America, said left-wing Democrats told themselves a faulty story — that winning the policy argument was the foremost way to build a political coalition. But doing so also requires building trust with voters, he said, because most Americans “look and ask, ‘Are they going to win over voters that aren’t like me or don’t care about politics?’”
“The self-branded progressive wing has to go beyond just the policy that fits the needs of the community,” he added. “Voters see that clearly. They’re making judgments about the whole person.”
There is cause for optimism among some on the left, given that issues that were once considered fringe are now popular.
In Illinois on Tuesday, Marie Newman, a progressive challenger supported by insurgent groups like the Justice Democrats, defeated an eight-term Democratic incumbent in the U.S. House of Representatives who opposed abortion.
And Mr. Biden has embraced some ideas in the past week that were championed by Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, including Ms. Warren’s bankruptcy plan and a proposal to make public college free for some students.
But others will forever rue a missed, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, presidential opportunity to define a Democratic Party going forward, and question if Mr. Biden’s current outreach efforts will continue.
After months of mocking Mr. Biden as a feckless front-runner, they acknowledge he managed to make the most important argument to Democrats: that his perceived ability to beat Mr. Trump should be valued over any policy in particular.
When Mr. Biden won her home state, Washington, in a belated race call this week, Representative Pramila Jayapal, who has endorsed Mr. Sanders and is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, “It’s clear that Washingtonians are ready and eager to turn the page on Donald Trump’s presidency.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez argued that Mr. Biden’s “electability” framework had dominated voters’ thoughts and press coverage, creating difficulties for both the female candidates in the primary race and the insurgent progressives.
“It wasn’t just ‘Can a woman win?’ but ‘Can a woman win against Trump in Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Pennsylvania,’” she said. “There was also the electability of the progressive movement. ‘Can single-payer health care win? I want it! But can it win?’”
And it is not just that Mr. Biden is winning, but how Mr. Sanders is losing: The Vermont senator has not won a single county in Florida, Michigan, Mississippi or Missouri.
The results are humbling for his allies, who entered the race oozing confidence. When Mr. Sanders led the field in fund-raising, they boasted of a national movement. When Ms. Warren was leading in polls and her policy ideas were dominating the conversation, they gloated that progressives did not have one presidential front-runner, but two.
But early victories by Mr. Sanders in New Hampshire and Nevada would soon run into a moderate buzz saw. Black voters in South Carolina embraced Mr. Biden, making clear to moderate Democrats across the country that the former vice president was their best hope at the nomination.
What happened next was the stuff of movies, as several of Mr. Biden’s former rivals dropped out and endorsed him, consolidating their ideological support, sending a powerful signal to voters across the country and propelling him to victories on Super Tuesday. In a mere 72 hours, he went from wounded candidate seeking a lifeline to front-runner with a delegate lead he is unlikely to surrender.
It is that window of time that has left progressives licking their political wounds.
In a speech on Tuesday evening after the results were announced in Florida and Illinois, Mr. Biden sought to appeal to younger voters, one of the few groups that progressives are still winning.
“Let me say especially to the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders, I hear you” Mr. Biden said. “I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do.”
Sean McElwee, the co-founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said the left’s vulnerability was in some ways self-inflicted; since Mr. Sanders’s first presidential campaign in 2016, he said, progressives have not focused enough on persuading mainstream Democrats to support their cause.
“By refusing to acknowledge persuasion, we leave ourselves out of part of the equation,” he said. “For progressives to have a seat at the table, we have to start speaking in the language that people are actually thinking in.”
Mr. Sanders has yet to comment on Tuesday’s results, and his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said on Wednesday morning that the senator would be “having conversations with supporters to assess his campaign.”
It is a stark contrast to what progressive leaders were saying in May, when their message to those who warned of Mr. Biden’s durability was to wait and see.
“This is what we’re going to test,” Mr. Shakir said at the time. “Where are people at?”
Not, evidently, with Mr. Sanders.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
I think because of how 2016 played out, one of the main takeaways from Bernie supporters was that the establishment was out to get them. It led to a lot of Trump-esque conspiracy theories that allow some Bernie supporters to lose the forest for the trees.... no, the majority of the Bernie bro vitriol is not Russian bots, no Warren is not obligated to back Bernie, etc.One would think this ass whopping would humble someone to the point they would be somewhat open to hearing from others. But I guess that echo chamber is just too comfy
The race is all but over but hopefully Bernie doesn't draw things out if he knows he is statistically out of the race
His final play is to bull Biden to the left.
What went wrong is voter suppression, continual discomfort in the system, more voter suppression, and the political machine working explicitly against him.
The DNC has formed like Voltron to thwart his campaign.
The DNC has formed like Voltron to thwart his campaign.
Able Archer 83
Two Minutes to Midnight
Please.
Bernie's biggest weakness and one that's been his continual undoing is that he's a politician who thinks he's too good for politics. The "political machine"--that is, the web of personal and political relationships that underlay American politics--is a fact. The DNC--the structure of the Democratic Party--is a fact. Bernie finds these things distasteful and rages against them; his distaste, however, doesn't mean they cease to exist as realities to be dealt with rather than ignored.. His decision to pretend otherwise, in effect to disregard reality, speaks poorly of him, as a politician and a candidate. It was straight hubris, and hubris is never an attractive quality.
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I’ll say it again. Nobody really likes him.