Progressives (Liberals)

That moment of truth leaves the reader “staring into space, the void opening at her feet.”

Days ago, results of Sanders’ canvassing began to be apparent; months ago, touted as a Biden stronghold.

I do find it a bit amazing that, so soon after the unlamented 20th century, which provided so many examples of the loss of freedom and poverty that results from their application, these ideas are so easily accepted by so many.

Yes, I hear Denmark is a horrible, destitute, wretched place to live.

Converting Denmark into a Muslim Country

Muslim immigrants in a town near Copenhagen have forced the cancellation of traditional Christmas displays this year even while spending lavishly on the Islamic Eid celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

The controversy has escalated into an angry nationwide debate over the role of Islam in post-Christian Denmark, where a burgeoning Muslim population is becoming increasingly assertive in imposing its will on a wide range of social and civic issues.

...Until recently, it was extraordinarily unusual for the government to seek such a stay from the justices while a case was still winding its way through lower courts. As Sotomayor warned in a dissenting opinion last September, "granting a stay pending appeal should be an 'extraordinary' act. Unfortunately, it appears the Government has treated this exceptional mechanism as a new normal."

According to a recent paper by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, "in less than three years, [Trump's] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone)" --- and Vladeck's paper did not include the Trump administration's two applications in the public charge cases. By comparison, "during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications --- averaging one every other Term."...

Given what we know about the conservative project to capture the courts through inserting conservative ideologues and thus to produce outcomes which forward that ideology AND given McConnell's block of Garland (on a pretense he has already admitted he would not follow should a new seat open up) it is mandatory that a first act of any new Dem president should be the appointment of two new liberal justices. The right will scream. **** 'em.

I read about that, went through quite a search to get the article. Sick SC vote.

But hardly surprising. That's what we get when we ignore reality out of some misplaced purity test.

Quote:

I do find it a bit amazing that, so soon after the unlamented 20th century, which provided so many examples of the loss of freedom and poverty that results from their application, these ideas are so easily accepted by so many.

Yes, I hear Denmark is a horrible, destitute, wretched place to live.

The Tyranny of the Minority, from Iowa Caucus to Electoral College

Quote:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says there would "absolutely" be situations where military action is warranted if he's elected president. In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper, Sanders laid out the criteria for when he would use the armed forces.

"Threats against the American people, to be sure. Threats against our allies. I believe in NATO," Sanders said. "I believe that the United States, everything being equal, should be working with other countries in alliance, not doing it alone."

Cooper asked Sanders if China taking military action against Taiwan would elicit a military response from the United States.

"That's something, yeah," Sanders said. "I mean I think we have got to make it clear to countries around the world that we will not sit by and allow invasions to take place, absolutely."

Sanders also said he would meet with Kim Jong Un as president.

"Yeah. I mean I've criticized Trump for everything... under the sun," Sanders said. "But meeting with people who are antagonistic is, to me, not a bad thing to do. I think, unfortunately, Trump went into that meeting unprepared. I think it was a photo opportunity and did not have the-- kind of the diplomatic work necessary to make it a success. But I do not have a problem with sitting down with adversaries all over the world."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-democratic-presidential-candidate-military-intervention-60-minutes-2020-02-23/

Comes on tonight.

Grapevine says Bernie ‘is in talks’ with a former presidential candidate for Veep slot.

Ex-Clinton adviser predicts Bloomberg, Clinton plotting 'scheme' to make Hillary the Dem nominee

Nobody will be nominated on the first ballot, and it'll go to a second ballot. Now, the problem is that the party establishment doesn't have a candidate. They can't do Bloomberg because he got killed in the debate. ... Can't do [Joe] Biden because he's already lost the frontrunner status. … [Pete] Buttigieg looks like a high school kid at the Model UN, and he's not gonna be able to have it, certainly not against [President Donald] Trump. [Elizabeth] Warren is third, but she's pretty far to the left, and people are not gonna want to— they're not going to want to trust her.

And when you put it together, it will go to a second ballot and then I think Hillary Clinton enters the race. And the superdelegates will all leave who they are for and go to Hillary.

The last four presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — are four very different politicians. But they have one crucial similarity: They all tried to appeal to voters who weren’t obvious supporters.

Clinton promised a “third way,” distinct from traditional Democratic or Republican policies. Bush ran on compassionate conservatism. Obama said that red and blue America shared more in common than pundits claimed.

Even Trump, radical as he is, flouted Republican orthodoxy by sounding like a populist Democrat on Social Security, Medicare and trade. Polls showed that voters judged Trump to be more moderate than any Republican nominee since the 1970s.

The art of peeling off voters — those in the middle or those who aren’t ideological — may be the most important skill in politics. It doesn’t require a mushy centrist policy agenda, either. Trump has made that clear. So, in earlier eras, did Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

How? By understanding that politics is inescapably performative. Voters respond to signals. They respond to gestures of respect from politicians who are willing to say, in effect: We may not agree on everything, but I see you and understand what matters to you.

The newly energetic American left has largely rejected this approach, choosing instead to believe a comforting myth about swing voters being extinct and turnout being a cure-all. It’s a big mistake.

Before going further, I want to make clear that this is not a column urging Democrats to return to Clintonian centrism. I’m making a different case — that the left is hurting its own ability to win elections and enact sweeping change, by insisting on an orthodox version of progressivism.

To put it another way: Can you think of one way that Bernie Sanders is signaling respect to voters outside of his base?

He has taken a nearly maximalist liberal position on every major issue. It’s especially striking from him, because he has shown over his career that he grasps the importance of building a coalition.

Sanders once won over blue-collar Vermonters with help from a moderate position on guns. “We need a sensible debate about gun control which overcomes the cultural divide that exists in this country,” he said in 2015, “and I think I can play an important role in this.” He was also once an heir to organized labor’s skepticism of large-scale immigration. “At a time when the middle class is shrinking, the last thing we need is to bring over in a period of years, millions of people into this country who are prepared to lower wages for American workers,” he said in 2007.

Now, though, Sanders has evidently decided that progressives will no longer accept impurities — or even much tactical vagueness. He, along with Elizabeth Warren, has embraced policies that are popular on the left and nowhere else: a ban on fracking; the decriminalization of border crossings; the provision of federal health benefits to undocumented immigrants; the elimination of private health insurance.

For many progressives, each of these issues has become a moral litmus test. Any restriction of immigration is considered a denial of human rights. Any compromise on guns or health care is an acceptance of preventable deaths.

And I understand the progressive arguments on these issues. But turning every compromise into an existential moral failing is not a smart way to practice politics. It comforts the persuaded while alienating the persuadable.

F.D.R. and Reagan understood this, as did Abraham Lincoln and many great social reformers, including Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Strong political movements can accept impurity on individual issues in the service of a larger goal: winning.

The impurities will still produce bitter complaints, of course. F.D.R. and Reagan were both lambasted by their allies at times. But few of those allies abandoned them. Victory is an excellent balm.

Over the past few years, the progressive left has made impressive progress, elevating issues like the $15 minimum wage, expanded Medicare and free college. A central figure in the movement, Sanders, is now the favorite to win the Democratic nomination.

But progressives are still a very long way from achieving the changes they seek. Republicans control the Senate, and a conservative majority runs the Supreme Court. Trump has an excellent chance to win re-election and usher in a dark era for American progressivism.

Faced with the potential of either large gains or historic losses, progressives would be wise to stop believing only what they want to believe. Don’t cherry-pick polls to claim that most Americans actually favor a ban on private insurance. Don’t imagine that millions of heretofore silent progressive supporters will materialize on Election Day. In the 2018 midterms, Sanders-style candidates lost swing districts, while candidates demonstrating respect to swing voters won again and again.

Beating Trump in November will be even harder. And uncomfortable compromises will make it more likely.

For Sanders, that may mean walking back his position on fracking, which threatens his chances in must-win Pennsylvania. It could also mean repeating some of his earlier arguments about the need for border security and immigration restrictions. Many working-class voters, including people of color, agree with that.

Sanders is not an ideal Democratic nominee. But he does have some big strengths. One of them is the passionate support he inspires, which gives him an opportunity to reach out to new voters while holding on to his base.

Can you think of one way that Bernie Sanders is signaling respect to voters outside of his base?

No compromise.
No fracking.
People who work in the fracking industry can have GND jobs or infrastructure jobs. New industries are rising to replace damaging industries.

Bernie will not walk back his position on fracking.

Sanders’ Nevada victory definitively disproved one of the most enduring myths about his campaign: that it could attract left-leaning young white people, but was incapable of drawing in a diverse coalition. In fact, voters of color were a primary source of Sanders’ strength in Nevada; he received the majority of Latino votes. Entrance polls showed Sanders winning “men and women, whites and Latinos, voters 17-29, 30-44 and 45-65, those with college degrees and those without, liberal Democrats (by a lot) and moderate/conservatives (narrowly), union and non-union households.” The poisonous concept of the white “Bernie Bro” as the “typical” Sanders supporter should be dead.

Some members of the media establishment had no idea what to make of Sanders’ Nevada victory. On MSNBC, James Carville said that “Putin” had won Nevada, and Chris Matthews declared the primary “over” (ill-advisedly comparing Sanders’ victory to the Nazi invasion of France). Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post admittedthat Sanders had been stronger with nonwhite voters than she expected, and it might now be “too late” to do anything about him.
...

Let’s be clear: the other candidates were crushed, and Nevada was yet more evidence that there is no longer much serious opposition to Sanders. Michael Bloomberg fizzled completely in his big debut, and Democrats would be out of their minds to enrage every Sanders supporter by nominating a Republican billionaire. Joe Biden has lost badly in all of the first three contests, and it’s very clear that he can’t run an effective campaign. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has nearly gone broke and in desperation she has resorted to relying on the Super PACs that she previously shunned. Pete Buttigieg can’t win voters of color or young people (and has accurately been described as sounding like “a neural network trained on West Wing episodes”). As Matthews says: it’s over. Bernie is dominating the fundraising, dominating the polls, and winning every primary. I am not sure Jacobin is right that “it’s Bernie’s party now”—for one thing, virtually the entire Congressional Democratic party is still opposed to Bernie. But it’s certainly Bernie’s nomination. There is simply no other credible candidate.