There is a natural tendency for people to believe that, for their opponents, the extremes represent the mainstream. This is not true for GOP or Dem.
David Brooks (a conservative) talks about how the Democrats are, still, a moderate party. That's where Joe Biden always has been, always will be.
Highlights:
You’ve probably heard of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but you may not have heard of Derek Kilmer. Kilmer grew up in a timber region in Washington State that had seen many of its logging jobs disappear. First at Princeton, then getting a Ph.D. at Oxford, he studied how towns recover from deindustrialization. He went back home to help his community recover economically and now represents that community in Congress.
Kilmer is the chairman of the largest ideological group among House Democrats, the New Democrat Coalition. The New Democrat Coalition is a caucus for moderate and center-left House Democrats. It has 103 House members, of whom 42 are the up-and-coming freshmen who brought the Democrats their majority. Its self-declared priorities are “pro-economic growth,” “pro-innovation” and “fiscal responsibility.”
You may not have heard of Kilmer or even the New Democrat Coalition. The media wing of the Republican Party wants to pretend that A.O.C., the Squad, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the Democratic Party because it wants you to think Democrats are a bunch of socialists.
Progressive Twitter is far to the left of the actual Democratic Party and it also emphasizes A.O.C., Sanders and Warren because that’s what makes its heart flutter. Even the mainstream media pays far more attention to the Squad than to Kilmer or moderates like Abigail Spanberger.
This week a thoughtful scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, fell for the mirage. She wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in which she disdained President Trump but said she would have to vote for him because the Democrats have moved so far left.
Pletka’s essay kicked up a storm, but usefully raised the question: Where exactly is the Democratic Party?
The professionals who actually run the party do not fall for the mirage. Nancy Pelosi understands that her job is to manage a group that includes both A.O.C. and the New Democrat Coalition’s members.
House Democrats began this Congress with nine bills that were their top priorities. They were about such things as infrastructure spending, lower prescription drug prices, voting rights, gerrymandering and democracy reform, and rejoining the Paris climate accords.
The Green New Deal and so-called Medicare for all were not on the table. Pelosi was promoting ideas a majority of the House Democrats could agree on, and these ideas are not radical left.
Joe Biden has the same approach. Biden was arguably the most moderate of the nearly 30 Democrats who ran for president in the past year. The team around him, the folks who would presumably lead his administration, are Clinton/Obama veterans and not exactly a bunch of left-wing woke activists: Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Jake Sullivan, Jeff Zients and Bruce Reed, one of the leaders of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.
They understand they are leading an extremely broad coalition and have done an excellent, underappreciated job of incorporating both moderate ideas and ideas from the Bernie Bros.
To the extent that Biden’s gone “left,” it’s mostly in areas where the moderates agree: quadrupling federal spending on low-income housing assistance, making community college free.
A Biden administration would not be further left than the Democratic voters out in the country or their representatives in Congress. Those voters are not mostly the urban gentrifiers who propel the left; they are mostly the “somewhat liberal” suburbanites and Black moderates who gave Biden the nomination.
In 2018, those voters massively rejected almost all of the nearly 80 Sanders-like insurgents the left put up to challenge more moderate incumbents in primaries. This year, with only three exceptions, they’ve done the same. This week Senator Chris Coons of Delaware held off a Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal challenger 73 percent to 27 percent.
If you ask whether the Democrats shifted too far left, my answer is: The party has gotten more ideologically diverse, but there is a large, strong center that will keep it in the political mainstream.
But there is a prior and more important question here: Are the Democrats a political party?
You might have thought that the Democratic and Republican Parties are different versions of the same thing, but that’s no longer true. As Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has noted, the G.O.P. is no longer a standard coalition party. It’s an anti-political insurgency that, even before Trump, has been elevating candidates with no political experience and who don’t believe in the compromise and jostle of politics.
Right now, Republicans are a culture war identity movement that suppresses factional disagreement and demands total loyalty to Trump.
The Democrats are still a normal political party. In 2020 they rejected the “base mobilization” candidates who imagine you can magically create a revolutionary majority if only you go purist.
Biden is a man who doesn’t do culture war, who will separate the cultural left from the political left, reduce politics back to its normal size and calm an increasingly apocalyptic and hysterical nation.
The Democratic Party is an institution that still practices coalition politics, that serves as a vehicle for the diverse interests and ideas in society to filter up into legislation, that plays by the rules of the game, that believes in rule of law. Right now, it is the only major party that does that.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/opinion/trump-biden-socialism.html
it would show that the dems are completely inadequate in messaging and promoting the agenda. Not a logical person in America believes the centrist dems has any say on what is going on in the party.
Riots with Biden staffers paying to bail out the criminals to do it again.
Medicare for illegals.
Eliminate tax breaks - a lethal post COVID prescription.
Green New Deal - AOC co-chairs the energy policy committee for Biden.
LGBTQ curriculum in our gradeschools.
Abortion by dismemberment up to birth with post birth killing of babies born alive legalized.
Paris Accord burden to be primarily placed on the US - again - an economy killer on it's own, but a very fast killer in the post COVID vulnerable economy.
Defunding of police. "Mr. Biden, do you support defunding the police?" Biden: "Yes". (He goes on in lawyer like fashion to say, "I would "divert" that money elsewhere - that's defunding.
Bail out for blue states whose foolish policies have bankrupted them.
Letting China off the hook wrt economic polices and their unleashing of COVID at us - Biden has been cozy with China his entire career.
Open borders with policies that encourage even more illegal immigration.
i could go on. But by any rational person's honest evaluation, the Dem Party HAS gone over the edge.
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keeps bringing up disproven information as fact. Of course, they take their cue from the self appointed:
" Nobody wants to........." smartest man on the board
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I spend a lot of time in California and New York. The Dem party in those states is radical as hell compared to the same party of my home state of Michigan. This is true on virtually every social and economic issue. The worst is that the coastal elites really do look down on people from flyover country. THIS is the motivation for former Dems who are willing to hold their noses and vote for Trump.
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and is worth reading, his opinions worth regarding.
This is a fair look at the D’s though I disagree with some of his thoughts.
This last paragraph is one that our fellow Trump supporter posters should heed. A bit soft but accurate.
“The Democratic Party is an institution that still practices coalition politics, that serves as a vehicle for the diverse interests and ideas in society to filter up into legislation, that plays by the rules of the game, that believes in rule of law. Right now, it is the only major party that does that.”
You keep linking these bullshit pieces like it's going to make a difference. You also think Biden is "in charge". You're wrong in both scenarios. Joe has flip flopped on just about every stance he took during the debates.
How was his performance last night in your eyes? Was he factually correct on most of his statements. A decent man would not stand on the stage and lie.
appears that he is also extreme left - though this may be due to extreme suggestibility to his handlers secondary to his dementia. At this point, he literally says whatever he thinks people want to hear, flip flopping constantly - far more than any politician that I have witnessed before.
I am firmly convinceed that he is mentally unfit, and the liberals on this board will quickly pretend that they have agreed all along down the road if they take control of the WH.
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You will never switch and will always remain a Liberal as long as there is a Republican (especially Trump) in the WH. It's like you're in a cult, to use your terms so you understand what I am talking about.
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He and others like him (on both sides) are what is currently wrong with this country.
you now fool yourself into thinking that this is all a temporary strategy to shore up votes within the Dem party, and that everything will go back to status quo because "Joe wouldn't ever really do those things".
In fact, your quote of, "Nobody's saying that [Fill in radical liberal agenda item actually being pushed]" reveals that you are not being realistic nor honest with yourself.
You are a good guy and I like you. We can disagree on politics, and that won't change. But sincerely, i tell you that you have no real idea what is coming if Biden wins this election. And Biden is NOT mentally fit for office, and he DOES have handlers, and even if he makes his own calls occasionally, he has come down so far Left that this is not your Dad's (or your grand dad's) Joe Biden anymore.
the faculty lounge?
he is willing to put himself out there. He also has a lot of expertise. People can have differing views without being evil. They can even be friends ( and should be).
He is a fellow alumnus of Notre Dame as well.
Feel free to argue his ideas, but I won't support any attack of him as a person, or any attack that questions his abilities or knowledge. I honestly wish he were in charge of his party - I wouldn't be afraid if he were.
Chris is a college professor. He wears Rockports. Ergo his judgement is fair game.
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You contribute jack shit except blowhard, empty, tough-guy lines.
You are a perfect Trumper.
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