AOC would be the best candidate by far; the problem is the mainstream media, which in 2016, 2020, and 2024 did absolutely nothing to identify the obvious danger the Right poses to every single human alive and to condemn the Right in a voice that can be heard and clearly understood.
Whoever the GOP/MAGA decides to run in 2028 will be at an immediate, insuperable disadvantage on Election Day. The MAGA electorate will have wandered off elsewhere as they begin to realize that they’d been had, that with every step Tя☭mp makes a weed does not actually die. The Party that gave them horrible, stupid, criminal Tя☭mp and made them more impoverished, less secure, and angrier than ever will not find them willing to head to the polls to vote for more of the same.
On the other hand I wonder about these Democrats who think a “Centrist” will be any more appealing. By 2028 there will be enough scandal, war/excursions, grift, sociopathic behavior, and impeachments on the GOP side that the country will be starving for the sort of change that Centrists will shun, but which the rest of us know will make our lives a hell of a lot better.
We crave a future for Americans that has always seemed like a big fat fantasy that's clothed in the evanescent fabric of a dream; but that was before the GOP proved to the world that so much power in the hands of the worst human beings alive will never make life livable for the rest of us.
The entire Republican Party had years of opportunities to prove that they knew better than to stand alongside an inhuman fascist instead of standing against him. It’s too late now. They’re toast.
Women make up 51% of the electorate, or so those who claim to know do say. However, without equal civil rights in this country, the Grand Old Pedophile party is doing its level best to take female voting and healthcare rights away state by state, even whlle working to take those rights away nationally. Before anyone accuses me of hysteria, I present exhibit A to this court of opinion: the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, FOUR YEARS AGO. It has only gotten worse for females and those who identify as female in this country since then. I DO NOT BELIEVE A DEMOCRAT CENTRIST/NEVER TRUMPER WOULD EVER WORK WITH CONGRESS TO SIGN THE RATIFIED ERA INTO LAW. I do believe a progressive Dem would work toward it, though.
Mainstream and conservative Dems need new ideas. Here's one. A constitutional amendment restricting the President's pardon power. Trump is pardoning a lot of fraudsters, meaning their victims don't get restitution. Talk over and over about Trump's corruption. Make it stick.
Goodness... the first thing I thought when I saw "combative centrism" was exactly your point, i.e. "Obviously, a “moderate” presidential nominee won’t actually have “big ideas” beyond winning the election and governing so that no one is so offended that you risk losing another election."
That these morons and self-interested numb nuts can't see themselves for what they are is really depressing. Bunch of dumbass fuck nuts... God I'm sick of that shit.
Hey, let's get a moderate Nazi party going, we won't gas 'em all, we'll just deport them!
These moderates don’t seem to realize that the more they make out leftists like AOC to be “extreme” while trying to make themselves look more normal, all it does is enforce the idea that the Democrats have a powerful wing outside the mainstream, and these moderates won’t convince voters so much to trust that they can keep the AOCs in line but rather that the whole party is dangerous.
A better strategy is to make out the leftists as reasonable coalition partners that you largely agree with, because their policy goals are pretty normal actually, and that while you differ on many of them (because you’re more conservative) these leftists can help you pass normal, broadly popular things. The main thing is that these leftists may differ with you somewhat on policy, but all of you (leftist and moderate) are within a range of normal, it is the Republicans who are all extremist whack jobs way off to the right.
That’s the positioning that can appeal to left and middle, and sends the message that whatever policy differences we (everyone to the left of Hitler) have, we can all work together, just keep the nutty Republicans out.
"Third Way president Jon Cowan opened the event with shots at Ocasio-Cortez, who wasn’t even trying to hold Fort Sumter. He also blasted “out-of-touch teachers’ unions” and “the language police,”"
This is straight-up MAGA messaging.
The ONLY time a 'Third Way' candidate ever won was Clinton in 1992, and that was only because of Perot's strong showing as a third party candidate. Without Perot, there is no Bill Clinton Presidency.
Clinton won in '96 because the US was in good times, he was popular, and the Republicans ran the blandest of bland Bob Dole, who was not firebrand enough for the Gingrich 'Contract On America' proto MAGA.
The nation then elected Chimpy because the electorate has never liked 'Republican-Lite', period, and the Republican Puke Funnel was starting to fire on all cylinders.
There is a straight line between Third Way dominance in the Democratic Party from 1992 to the catastrophic shitshow we're in today.
They need to go the way of the Whigs to the ash heap of history.
It's funny how much of their shpiel sounds like it could come from a pre-trump fox news show. Really goes to show where they stand on the political spectrum.
Also, "combative centrism" is alive and well in the Democratic party. Just look at manchin, cinema, fetterman, and Schumer.
Separate topic entirely: Yglesias saying that politics have shifted to the left is so hilariously counterfactual it would be the final nail in the coffin of his career in a sane reality.
I'm not stupid enough to imagine that America is liberal. But I do think Americans are, by and large, sick of politicians whose only principles come out of the latest poll results.
People whose stand is to protect the status quo as if the status quo is beneficial or helpful to most Americans. People who win elections to just win elections and do nothing with their power to actually improve shit.
Then again, Joe Biden actually did improve shit and enough people hated his guts for it that we live in a dystopian nightmare now, so what the fuck do I know?
Biden’s problem wasn’t policy—he accomplished quite a bit and got us past COVID and into solid growth. His problem was he, the Dems and the Left in general have a total inability to win the communication war. The media in all forms puts them in a disadvantage and they haven’t even learned to recognize this let alone adjust to it.
He did, and people did. Though in reluctant fairness, the news sources that were supposed to be reliable and honest were so absurdly skewed against him and had such a massive hardon for trump it was basically inevitable that public opinion would turn the way it did.
The Great Republican Puke Funnel injecting their propaganmda into the mass media has been operating since the founding of Fox News which was explicitly created tobe the media arm of the radicalizing post-Nixon Republican party, stuffed with the revanchist Jim Crow Democrats and the radical Goldwater proto-fascists.
It's good in American politics for conservatives to rail against anything "liberal." And Third Way likes to look at the ascendancy of rampant conservatism as a kind of permission structure; very liberal places are rare in the United States after all.
And of course part of the whole reason for the conservatism is that typically liberal Democrats have advanced multicultural interests in the United States, and particularly have worked to enfranchise the minorities that the unreconstructed hate.
In essence, "racism is the reason for the season." Millions of Americans hate the idea of government spending (which is necessary for liberalism) because they believe the Feds to be taking their "hard-earned money" and giving it to Black people to drive around in nice cars and eat great food.
That said I want to see AOC try to go statewide. I want to see how this goes. If she can go statewide, that will show me a lot because there are few places like her district in the Bronx. I want all the cards on the table. If Americans want AOC's vision, they have to show me, not tell me.
"If Ocasio-Cortez can consolidate the left-wing — who are as notoriously hard to satisfy as Prince’s mother — and no centrist-approved Democrat can consolidate their own viable coalition, then maybe Ocasio-Cortez is the better candidate. We should go with nominating good candidates. It sounds crazy but it might just work."
Third Way doesn't seem to be concerned with saving democracy and the republic by stopping the fascists. But they want to stop AOC, who DOES want to save democracy and the republic, and knows that we need to stop the fascists to do so. She also is bold enough to want all Americans to have access to health care and living wage.
Third Way may call itself centrist, but it sounds more like a right wing outfit, just a little to the left of the fascists.
Exactly. And the most important feature is that if she became dem POTUS candidate, she would have done so by winning a robust primary. Whoever wins the primary is, BY DEFINITION the strongest candidate to run against the republican candidate
Like the reference to The Master of Disguise. I'm an AOC fan. Voted for Bernie. Willing to back a centrist candidate - though I don't think we'll have (real) elections - that supports and pushes for fair taxation, gun laws, makes pro-choice the law, redefines SCOTUS and actually fights authoritarianism (unlike the current centrists).
What, was James Carville not available for a quote? How these people make a living spouting absolute nonsense will always baffle me. It's not a fucking mystery that far left candidates are gaining in popularity. They are the ones advocating for things like universal healthcare, childcare and education, you know, shit people actually want. But no, let's nominate someone who won't rock the boat (for the wealthy), who won't try for any accountability for everything going on right now, who thinks we can just "get back to normal". Normal is gone forever, now is the time to make changes. I'm 100% behind President AOC.
I'm not entirely certain that "third Way' isn't a far right spoiler organization in sheep's clothing.
Tell ya one thing though. 2028 is going to be a populist election and the only 'populist' I see that I like is AOC...Mamdani is a total jerk because he had to go and get born in Uganda so he's not eligible to run...If he REALLY cared about America he would have been born here in the US
I've felt that way about Third Way - being more RW and a spoiler. They call themselves centrist, which fools too many people. Using the word "centrist" is their sheep's clothing.
AOC would be the best candidate by far; the problem is the mainstream media, which in 2016, 2020, and 2024 did absolutely nothing to identify the obvious danger the Right poses to every single human alive and to condemn the Right in a voice that can be heard and clearly understood.
Whoever the GOP/MAGA decides to run in 2028 will be at an immediate, insuperable disadvantage on Election Day. The MAGA electorate will have wandered off elsewhere as they begin to realize that they’d been had, that with every step Tя☭mp makes a weed does not actually die. The Party that gave them horrible, stupid, criminal Tя☭mp and made them more impoverished, less secure, and angrier than ever will not find them willing to head to the polls to vote for more of the same.
On the other hand I wonder about these Democrats who think a “Centrist” will be any more appealing. By 2028 there will be enough scandal, war/excursions, grift, sociopathic behavior, and impeachments on the GOP side that the country will be starving for the sort of change that Centrists will shun, but which the rest of us know will make our lives a hell of a lot better.
We crave a future for Americans that has always seemed like a big fat fantasy that's clothed in the evanescent fabric of a dream; but that was before the GOP proved to the world that so much power in the hands of the worst human beings alive will never make life livable for the rest of us.
The entire Republican Party had years of opportunities to prove that they knew better than to stand alongside an inhuman fascist instead of standing against him. It’s too late now. They’re toast.
Women make up 51% of the electorate, or so those who claim to know do say. However, without equal civil rights in this country, the Grand Old Pedophile party is doing its level best to take female voting and healthcare rights away state by state, even whlle working to take those rights away nationally. Before anyone accuses me of hysteria, I present exhibit A to this court of opinion: the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, FOUR YEARS AGO. It has only gotten worse for females and those who identify as female in this country since then. I DO NOT BELIEVE A DEMOCRAT CENTRIST/NEVER TRUMPER WOULD EVER WORK WITH CONGRESS TO SIGN THE RATIFIED ERA INTO LAW. I do believe a progressive Dem would work toward it, though.
Mainstream and conservative Dems need new ideas. Here's one. A constitutional amendment restricting the President's pardon power. Trump is pardoning a lot of fraudsters, meaning their victims don't get restitution. Talk over and over about Trump's corruption. Make it stick.
Goodness... the first thing I thought when I saw "combative centrism" was exactly your point, i.e. "Obviously, a “moderate” presidential nominee won’t actually have “big ideas” beyond winning the election and governing so that no one is so offended that you risk losing another election."
That these morons and self-interested numb nuts can't see themselves for what they are is really depressing. Bunch of dumbass fuck nuts... God I'm sick of that shit.
Hey, let's get a moderate Nazi party going, we won't gas 'em all, we'll just deport them!
Oh wait...
These moderates don’t seem to realize that the more they make out leftists like AOC to be “extreme” while trying to make themselves look more normal, all it does is enforce the idea that the Democrats have a powerful wing outside the mainstream, and these moderates won’t convince voters so much to trust that they can keep the AOCs in line but rather that the whole party is dangerous.
A better strategy is to make out the leftists as reasonable coalition partners that you largely agree with, because their policy goals are pretty normal actually, and that while you differ on many of them (because you’re more conservative) these leftists can help you pass normal, broadly popular things. The main thing is that these leftists may differ with you somewhat on policy, but all of you (leftist and moderate) are within a range of normal, it is the Republicans who are all extremist whack jobs way off to the right.
That’s the positioning that can appeal to left and middle, and sends the message that whatever policy differences we (everyone to the left of Hitler) have, we can all work together, just keep the nutty Republicans out.
AOC has already filed to run for re-election to her House seat. They’ll have to find another bogeyman/woman to clutch their pearls over.
Well, not for 2028 probably
"Third Way president Jon Cowan opened the event with shots at Ocasio-Cortez, who wasn’t even trying to hold Fort Sumter. He also blasted “out-of-touch teachers’ unions” and “the language police,”"
This is straight-up MAGA messaging.
The ONLY time a 'Third Way' candidate ever won was Clinton in 1992, and that was only because of Perot's strong showing as a third party candidate. Without Perot, there is no Bill Clinton Presidency.
Clinton won in '96 because the US was in good times, he was popular, and the Republicans ran the blandest of bland Bob Dole, who was not firebrand enough for the Gingrich 'Contract On America' proto MAGA.
The nation then elected Chimpy because the electorate has never liked 'Republican-Lite', period, and the Republican Puke Funnel was starting to fire on all cylinders.
There is a straight line between Third Way dominance in the Democratic Party from 1992 to the catastrophic shitshow we're in today.
They need to go the way of the Whigs to the ash heap of history.
It's funny how much of their shpiel sounds like it could come from a pre-trump fox news show. Really goes to show where they stand on the political spectrum.
Also, "combative centrism" is alive and well in the Democratic party. Just look at manchin, cinema, fetterman, and Schumer.
Separate topic entirely: Yglesias saying that politics have shifted to the left is so hilariously counterfactual it would be the final nail in the coffin of his career in a sane reality.
“radical leftism”
Read: "We're willing to kick trans people to the curb just as hard as you!" See: Matt Y, Ruy T, etc.
I'm not stupid enough to imagine that America is liberal. But I do think Americans are, by and large, sick of politicians whose only principles come out of the latest poll results.
People whose stand is to protect the status quo as if the status quo is beneficial or helpful to most Americans. People who win elections to just win elections and do nothing with their power to actually improve shit.
Then again, Joe Biden actually did improve shit and enough people hated his guts for it that we live in a dystopian nightmare now, so what the fuck do I know?
Biden’s problem wasn’t policy—he accomplished quite a bit and got us past COVID and into solid growth. His problem was he, the Dems and the Left in general have a total inability to win the communication war. The media in all forms puts them in a disadvantage and they haven’t even learned to recognize this let alone adjust to it.
He did, and people did. Though in reluctant fairness, the news sources that were supposed to be reliable and honest were so absurdly skewed against him and had such a massive hardon for trump it was basically inevitable that public opinion would turn the way it did.
The Great Republican Puke Funnel injecting their propaganmda into the mass media has been operating since the founding of Fox News which was explicitly created tobe the media arm of the radicalizing post-Nixon Republican party, stuffed with the revanchist Jim Crow Democrats and the radical Goldwater proto-fascists.
It's good in American politics for conservatives to rail against anything "liberal." And Third Way likes to look at the ascendancy of rampant conservatism as a kind of permission structure; very liberal places are rare in the United States after all.
And of course part of the whole reason for the conservatism is that typically liberal Democrats have advanced multicultural interests in the United States, and particularly have worked to enfranchise the minorities that the unreconstructed hate.
In essence, "racism is the reason for the season." Millions of Americans hate the idea of government spending (which is necessary for liberalism) because they believe the Feds to be taking their "hard-earned money" and giving it to Black people to drive around in nice cars and eat great food.
That said I want to see AOC try to go statewide. I want to see how this goes. If she can go statewide, that will show me a lot because there are few places like her district in the Bronx. I want all the cards on the table. If Americans want AOC's vision, they have to show me, not tell me.
And WHY do those "Millions of Americans" believe those lies? BECAUSE THE WHITE SUPREMACIST THEOCRATS OF THE RIGHT have been screaming this since 1980.
The church (with some exceptions) has been rabidly white supremacist since it's inception.
"If Ocasio-Cortez can consolidate the left-wing — who are as notoriously hard to satisfy as Prince’s mother — and no centrist-approved Democrat can consolidate their own viable coalition, then maybe Ocasio-Cortez is the better candidate. We should go with nominating good candidates. It sounds crazy but it might just work."
There you go, making too much sense again!
Third Way doesn't seem to be concerned with saving democracy and the republic by stopping the fascists. But they want to stop AOC, who DOES want to save democracy and the republic, and knows that we need to stop the fascists to do so. She also is bold enough to want all Americans to have access to health care and living wage.
Third Way may call itself centrist, but it sounds more like a right wing outfit, just a little to the left of the fascists.
Narrator voice: They've always been right wing shitwads, the United States is just so conservative they used to sound almost centrist.
"MAGA-Lite"
Exactly. And the most important feature is that if she became dem POTUS candidate, she would have done so by winning a robust primary. Whoever wins the primary is, BY DEFINITION the strongest candidate to run against the republican candidate
Like the reference to The Master of Disguise. I'm an AOC fan. Voted for Bernie. Willing to back a centrist candidate - though I don't think we'll have (real) elections - that supports and pushes for fair taxation, gun laws, makes pro-choice the law, redefines SCOTUS and actually fights authoritarianism (unlike the current centrists).
“We laid out a vision for a combative centrism,"
Centrist 'vision'...It IS to laugh!
"Combative centrism." It's like being a militant agnostic: "I don't know and *you don't EITHER!*"
What, was James Carville not available for a quote? How these people make a living spouting absolute nonsense will always baffle me. It's not a fucking mystery that far left candidates are gaining in popularity. They are the ones advocating for things like universal healthcare, childcare and education, you know, shit people actually want. But no, let's nominate someone who won't rock the boat (for the wealthy), who won't try for any accountability for everything going on right now, who thinks we can just "get back to normal". Normal is gone forever, now is the time to make changes. I'm 100% behind President AOC.
I'm not entirely certain that "third Way' isn't a far right spoiler organization in sheep's clothing.
Tell ya one thing though. 2028 is going to be a populist election and the only 'populist' I see that I like is AOC...Mamdani is a total jerk because he had to go and get born in Uganda so he's not eligible to run...If he REALLY cared about America he would have been born here in the US
(:
I've felt that way about Third Way - being more RW and a spoiler. They call themselves centrist, which fools too many people. Using the word "centrist" is their sheep's clothing.
Love the Carville line. And I forget health and child care in my list. Hit enter too quickly.