Many Americans Say the Democratic Party Does Not Share Their Priorities

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4thgenheel said:
@Kingpin if you want to get to know Jeff, a great place to start is all of his social media posts from when he was in congress. they're just basic videos of him on camera discussing and explaining political happenings.

he just gets it. he really knows how to calmly and effectively communicate with people.
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Ah, I see. I don’t live in NC but do know of Jeff Jackson from this board. But I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. Maybe now I can.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
I suspect much of the low rating of Congressional Democrats right now is less from people not approving of their policies than from committed Democrats who are frustrated and in some cases fed up with the weak response of the party to what has been happening since Trump and Co-President Musk took office. Holding up little paddles with slogans on them certainly isn't going to help that impression.
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OK, what should the party do? Dem governors in Dem states are actively resisting Trump. Dem lawyers are filing lawsuits everywhere. The Dem party has sued over Trump's monarchical approach vis-a-vis the FEC.

I keep wondering what is it that people want to see?
 
Paine said:
I think a lot of liberal Democrats have come around to many of Bernie’s criticism. Whether they’re willing to admit that publicly…That’s a different question.
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Bernie's "criticism" has NEVER been an issue among liberal Dems. The Dems have never wanted to stop being the party of the working class. Here are the issues with Bernie:

1. He went on about how Hillary was corrupt. That was a terrible decision and it probably cost us the election. It's one thing for voters to hear shit-talk about the candidate from the opponent. It's another thing entirely when someone from the same party is shitting on the candidate. Going after HRC's integrity was a huge no-no. It was the sign of a person -- or in the case of his supporters, people -- who have lost the plot. It was more of this "no difference between Pubs and Dems" even as the Pubs were nominating Donald Trump.

2. Unforgiveable: he attacked the integrity of the party's primary system, calling it rigged. Absolutely unforgiveable. First, it wasn't rigged. Second, there's no requirement that the Dems open the primary to non-Dems; Bernie could have been excluded, but he wasn't and then he had the temerity to call it rigged. Third, you don't ever attack the party under whose banner you want to run. Attack the policies? Fine. Obviously. Attack the record of success? Fine. But when you go after the integrity of the party, that's unforgiveable.

3. When Bernie was asked about Castro in 2020, the proper answer was: I was wrong about Castro in the 1980s. I was a mayor in Vermont, and I didn't appreciate the full scope of Castro. Again, we live in an environment where the Pubs just randomly call out all Dems as radical Marxists. And people believed it in 2020. They probably believed it in 2024. It makes it harder for us to dismiss those allegations when we have a leader, one of the top candidates, praising Castro.

4. Bernie and Bernie bros have never given any indication that they have grasped with the problem of race. Yes, they were more inclusive in 2020 than in 2016, but that's not really the problem. The problem is that the Dems cannot win an election with the WWC class vote, no matter how worker-oriented we are, because the WWC refuses to be in a coalition with black people. That's a tale as old as the Republic. What was the seismic change in party identification in the 20th century? It was about race, and in particular, working class whites abandoning the Dems after the Civil Rights Act. And the seismic change of this century has been the same thing: Trump upended ideological fault lines because he rallied white people around racism.

The idea that Dems are going to win the WWC vote in this era of resurgent virulent open racism is insane. We've seen over and over again: MAGA will support Trump fucking them over repeatedly so long as he hates the right people with them.

The consequence is that the Schumer coalition: minorities, suburban professional liberals, unions, working class people who aren't turned off by "DEI" or "Woke" or the new bullshit -- that's how we win. And Bernie alienates the professional liberals, and doesn't do enough to attract minorities. So he's left with a political program that can win only if class solidarity is stronger than racism and that has never been true.

And my complaint with Bernie supporters is exactly that: they take a romanticized view of class solidarity, as if the working class has just lacked the right messenger over all these years to unite it. It has never been true in the United States. It is not going to be true in the foreseeable future.

5. I don't care about arguments like, "if we don't give white working class people a positive program, then we let their racism take over" or whatever version of that argument is trendy. That's just romanticized speculation that again, has never been true in American history. AND, I should say, that if we don't have educated professionals in the party, then we are never going to do the right thing for the country. I don't want blue MAGA to run the show.

To put it more bluntly: I do not want the Squad making policy. With one prominent exception, the progressive house caucus has learned nothing about policy or governance in their years in DC. The most obvious example of that was the uncommitted fiasco. Tlaib is all righteous indignation; zero policy realism. That is the not the profile of someone who should be charged with making our laws. AOC, of course, is the prominent exception and I admire the way she has reoriented herself. She sure as hell ain't no bartender any more. But she still has bad policy instincts. I don't hold that against her; it's only to say that if the best member of the caucus is average on policy, that's not a great sign.
 
I should add that one of the reasons we can't build anything in this country is that the left indiscriminately shoves its agenda wherever it can, regardless of whether it makes sense. For instance:

1. In New York and other places, developers need to do more than provide an environmental impact statement. They must also provide an environmental justice analysis. That assessment is one of the biggest holdups, because it's super-manipulable, there are not good standards to define what environmental justice means, and it isn't even really possible in many cases to abate the EJ factors. Why?

Basically when you require projects to consider environmental justice in the planning stages, the end result is that you aren't going to be able to build anything. Because for the most part, a lot of the environmental justice factors simply militate against development. "Traffic" or "pollution from traffic" is an important consideration in EJ analysis. We don't want to foist more air pollution on vulnerable communities. Fine, but traffic is going to be a problem for everything someone might try to build. And sure, it would be nice for our major traffic arteries to be spread out across many different communities, but that's not how the world works. Rich people will always move away. We are always going to have more car and truck traffic in poor neighborhoods.

This is just not the right way to address environmental justice. Why is it done that way? Because other options are expensive. One problem in poor minority communities is the buildup of lead in the soil from decades of leaded gasoline and leaded paint. Good, so we should clean it up. But that's expensive. It's not something you can do TOMORROW to make an improvement. What you can do TOMORROW is block construction projects on the ground that they might kick up lead from the soil into the atmosphere. And then the progressives tend to clap their hands and move on, oblivious to the effect: development is not happening.

(note: that's just one example that comes to mind).

2. Jones Act. I fucking hate that piece of legislation. Whenever conservatives want to pull out examples of liberal regulations doing little more than causing economic hardship, they pull out the Jones Act. That act actually does a lot of things and I'm not criticizing it in its entirety, but the fundamental premise of requiring all merchant marine vessels to be American is insane.

Why is it that every time there's something that really needs to be done -- i.e. pretty much any significant FEMA operation -- the Jones Act gets waived? What does say about it? To me, it says that the Jones Act is causing inefficiencies that we for some reason tolerate except in an emergency, when the inefficiencies get rooted out by necessity. Legislation that has to be waived to get things done is bad legislation.

So why can't the left stand up and say, "let's raise the minimum wage and repeal the Jones Act" at the same time. BTW, the Jones Act is used as a cudgel against offshore wind farms. One would think progressives might care about that, but it would require progressives to be paying attention to the details. That's not how progressives tend to work. All indignation and moral crusading, no policy acumen is just not a path for the Dems to go down. We need government to work, as that's kind of our whole thing.

3. Trans-Pacific Partnership. That was a terrible lowlight for the left, all the strenuous opposition to something that would make little difference except in foreign policy. Again, if you don't read the thing you're supposedly fighting against, then you're going to engage stupid fights.

So I don't think the TPP was a huge factor in 2016, but we did hear about it on the campaign trail from Bernie and at the convention. Well, HRC supported it. Because it was a good idea. It was good governance. But the progressives screamed, "corporate uniparty selling out the working class" and that had little basis in reality.

4. Tariff nonsense: it's been the left and the unions on the side of tariffs since before Trump. This is just remarkably stupid and, again, it's hard to take these people seriously when they don't bother learning about what tariffs do and don't do. I'm aware of the issue of WTO accession for China, but you see, the progressives were fighting the wrong battle. They fought against the accession itself instead of fighting for the consequences of the accession. If the progressives had pushed for a policy of WTO accession with robust displaced-worker aid, we might be in a better spot. Instead, we got throwaway displaced-worker aid that was never taken very seriously.

There are few lessons more established in economics than tariffs are bad. There can be a few narrow exceptions, but they are narrow and second order. This is easy to see from the prevalence of tariffs inside the US -- i.e. there aren't any. Why not? Why has nobody ever asked to amend the constitution to allow North Carolina to tariff goods coming from Virginia?

There have been some occasions when states have tried to enact beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies. One example came from the early days of tractor trailer truck traffic. Iowa passed a law to limit the size of tractor trailers on its roads -- a limit that was smaller than the average length of a long-haul trailer. The idea was to make the interstate traffic go through Missouri or Minnesota instead of Iowa. Not only did the law get overturned, but I've never heard anyone say anything good about that regulation. When I was in law school, the consensus of everyone I knew (including a lot of die hard liberals) was "yeah, Iowa was being an asshole."
 
MOUNTAINH33L said:
I know y'all aren't down with my guy Bernie, but his mantra of becoming the party of the working class seems to have some merit. Do I think he could get elected POTUS? LOL no. I mean, I'd vote for him if he was on the main ticket. We all know that won't happen. My point is that he has some reasonable takes on how to move forward that I think the Democrats should embrace. I'll go ahead and seek shelter now.
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Sherrod Brown has some time on his hands and he has very solid working class credentials.
 
For the record, I see my reaction to Boebert as more a poor reflection on me than a rallying cry to unify men of all stripes to denigrate women with old stereotypes about sluttiness.

I'm not worried about it, because it's not a sentiment that pops up for me except in rare cases, and because I don't act on it (or do my best not to), and nobody is perfect. But it's not a great look for me, in my view.
 
superrific said:
Bernie's "criticism" has NEVER been an issue among liberal Dems. The Dems have never wanted to stop being the party of the working class. Here are the issues with Bernie:

1. He went on about how Hillary was corrupt. That was a terrible decision and it probably cost us the election. It's one thing for voters to hear shit-talk about the candidate from the opponent. It's another thing entirely when someone from the same party is shitting on the candidate. Going after HRC's integrity was a huge no-no. It was the sign of a person -- or in the case of his supporters, people -- who have lost the plot. It was more of this "no difference between Pubs and Dems" even as the Pubs were nominating Donald Trump.

2. Unforgiveable: he attacked the integrity of the party's primary system, calling it rigged. Absolutely unforgiveable. First, it wasn't rigged. Second, there's no requirement that the Dems open the primary to non-Dems; Bernie could have been excluded, but he wasn't and then he had the temerity to call it rigged. Third, you don't ever attack the party under whose banner you want to run. Attack the policies? Fine. Obviously. Attack the record of success? Fine. But when you go after the integrity of the party, that's unforgiveable.

3. When Bernie was asked about Castro in 2020, the proper answer was: I was wrong about Castro in the 1980s. I was a mayor in Vermont, and I didn't appreciate the full scope of Castro. Again, we live in an environment where the Pubs just randomly call out all Dems as radical Marxists. And people believed it in 2020. They probably believed it in 2024. It makes it harder for us to dismiss those allegations when we have a leader, one of the top candidates, praising Castro.

4. Bernie and Bernie bros have never given any indication that they have grasped with the problem of race. Yes, they were more inclusive in 2020 than in 2016, but that's not really the problem. The problem is that the Dems cannot win an election with the WWC class vote, no matter how worker-oriented we are, because the WWC refuses to be in a coalition with black people. That's a tale as old as the Republic. What was the seismic change in party identification in the 20th century? It was about race, and in particular, working class whites abandoning the Dems after the Civil Rights Act. And the seismic change of this century has been the same thing: Trump upended ideological fault lines because he rallied white people around racism.

The idea that Dems are going to win the WWC vote in this era of resurgent virulent open racism is insane. We've seen over and over again: MAGA will support Trump fucking them over repeatedly so long as he hates the right people with them.

The consequence is that the Schumer coalition: minorities, suburban professional liberals, unions, working class people who aren't turned off by "DEI" or "Woke" or the new bullshit -- that's how we win. And Bernie alienates the professional liberals, and doesn't do enough to attract minorities. So he's left with a political program that can win only if class solidarity is stronger than racism and that has never been true.

And my complaint with Bernie supporters is exactly that: they take a romanticized view of class solidarity, as if the working class has just lacked the right messenger over all these years to unite it. It has never been true in the United States. It is not going to be true in the foreseeable future.

5. I don't care about arguments like, "if we don't give white working class people a positive program, then we let their racism take over" or whatever version of that argument is trendy. That's just romanticized speculation that again, has never been true in American history. AND, I should say, that if we don't have educated professionals in the party, then we are never going to do the right thing for the country. I don't want blue MAGA to run the show.

To put it more bluntly: I do not want the Squad making policy. With one prominent exception, the progressive house caucus has learned nothing about policy or governance in their years in DC. The most obvious example of that was the uncommitted fiasco. Tlaib is all righteous indignation; zero policy realism. That is the not the profile of someone who should be charged with making our laws. AOC, of course, is the prominent exception and I admire the way she has reoriented herself. She sure as hell ain't no bartender any more. But she still has bad policy instincts. I don't hold that against her; it's only to say that if the best member of the caucus is average on policy, that's not a great sign.
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"Unforgiveable: he attacked the integrity of the party's primary system....."

Along with Donna Brazile (sp) and Elizabeth Warren. Maybe there's some fire along with the smoke.

Brazile also expressed extreme regret for giving Hillary questions in advance of a Townhall. Maybe that regret is elevated because she knows something about the primary and alleged rigging.
 
Paine said:

“A plurality of voters — 40 percent — said the Democratic Party doesn’t have any strategy whatsoever for responding to Trump, according to the survey by the liberal firm Blueprint that was shared first with POLITICO. Another 24 percent said Democrats have a game plan, but it’s a bad one.

A paltry 10 percent said that the party has a solid technique for dealing with Trump. And that’s coming from a Democratic outfit’s survey.“
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There is no strategy for dealing with Trump or those who support him. Ita like saying "let's have a quiet sit down and work it all out" with Charles Manson.
 
ZenMode said:
"Unforgiveable: he attacked the integrity of the party's primary system....."

Along with Donna Brazile (sp) and Elizabeth Warren. Maybe there's some fire along with the smoke.

Brazile also expressed extreme regret for giving Hillary questions in advance of a Townhall. Maybe that regret is elevated because she knows something about the primary and alleged rigging.
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Warren did so a year after the fact, in response to Brazile, and she walked it back. The Democratic Party did back HRC over Bernie, as you would expect a party do when one its members was running against a non-member. But the votes were all fair; Sanders had more than enough opportunity to be heard; and in the end, he benefited from whatever the DNC did to promote HRC.

I have no issue with Bernie criticizing the system. If he wanted to say, superdelegates aren't appropriate when the voters are supposed to choose the candidate, fine. That's constructive criticism. But he said the system was rigged because he was losing, that he would have won but for the rigging. That made him the initial election-denier. Before Trump, before Kari Lake or Kandiss Taylor, there was Bernie refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the contest because he thought he should have been winning. That's unforgiveable.

That he later endorsed Clinton didn't matter that much. The damage had already been done. Thus Bernie was one of the people who legitimized the election denial.
 
wmheel1287 said:
There is no strategy for dealing with Trump or those who support him. Ita like saying "let's have a quiet sit down and work it all out" with Charles Manson.
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Or, "Do you think you should take time to think this through?" - To Jim Jones' cultists as they about to drink the poison. It would not work well.

One wonders how far we are from people who object to Trump/Musk falling out of high windows.
 
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