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this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Centrists will never compromise leftward.
I think this is more because of a population imbalance. Left voters are not numerous enough to be worth compromising for -- on a purely numbers based assessment. The middle is a larger and more reliable voter base.
But, I think that's going to change over the next few decades. Progressives and further left people are becoming an increasingly important and large voting bloc. Numerically it will soon make sense to compromise leftwards to get more votes than compromising with the center. We're just not there yet.
If they're a large enough group to blame when ya lose, they're a large enough group to compromise with.
I don't disagree there, but that's also why I don't believe in blaming the left nor attributing losses to them. It isn't a large enough group to have that much sway yet.
From a rhetorical perspective I agree -- if politicians are willing to blame the left, they should be willing to work with them. Like you say, it's logically inconsistent to blame them but also think they aren't worth compromising with.
I also think the "rebelliousness" of leftists is overstated. I firmly believe most of them vote with Democrats so that there is harm reduction. I think a lot of the detractors are just a loud online minority. I strongly suspect for instance the "don't threaten me with the supreme court" crowd was not even close to most of the progressives who voted in 2016. More Bernie supporters voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton supporters for Obama in 2008, on a percentage basis.
It's more than that. Clinton supporters started a PAC to get McCain elected when Obama won the nomination. And they're the same people who keep saying "blue no matter who."
There's definitely a considerable number of so called Democrats who find Republicans favorable to Progressives, which is utterly disgusting and a betrayal of their espoused values. Just like the loud progressive minority though, I'd like to think of them as a whiny minority that doesn't reflect most people. I think at the end of the day these two extremes are a dismissible collective group. Most of us can truly cooperate and agree on most things, and find the loud minority repulsive.
Along those lines, I appreciate that you have been consistently reasonable in discussions and arguments. Your criticisms are well founded in evidence and you show that it's possible to be critical and displeased with Biden while still voting for him. That's a level of intellectual nuance I wish I saw more of.
And yet in 2008, Obama won despite their efforts at sabotage. To hear centrists talk about it, anyone who so much as thought a positive thought regarding Bernie Sanders is solely responsible for Clinton's loss in 2016.
We should be able to safely ignore the pampered, spoiled centrists who threw a massive tantrum when they didn't get 100% of everything they wanted in 2008, and ignore progressives at our peril. We do the opposite.
I agree. I think the spoiled centrists are a smaller group than the progressives overall. And it's utterly foolish to blame progressives and Sanders for Clinton's loss in 2016. There were a myriad of issues which all came together, like Russian meddling and the Comey letter and her taking the blue wall for granted. These factors combined had more effect than progressive detractors.