I can agree that many Americans aren't aware of foreign policies. It's still a ridiculous lie that progressives haven't been trying to persuade and convince moderates and establishment voters. You and Sean just need to get off twitter for a while. The people you think aren't being reached out to get their politics from the media and from their community. I welcome you to figure out how to get a positive anti-corporate message through Viacom or Comcast, i'm sure AOC would love to figure it out before she runs for President.
As for the community, the black vote is honestly just a huge fucking mystery for progressives. All we seemingly know is that black voters prefer a candidate they are historically familiar with, and someone they believe moderate whites will vote for. The requirement that a candidate seem "electable" is presumably based on Republicans being so historically anti-black that defeating them will always be a larger existential motivation than progressive policies ever could be. Of course that's debatable, but that seems to be the current understanding. So when progressives call black voters conservative, or condescendingly imply that they're voting against their own interests, it's very incorrect. Seemingly black voters (in a major generalization) vote based on who they know/trust, and who they think can win, because they don't believe they can afford to lose the election. It's difficult to envision how an upstart progressive movement could break through that logic.
Unsurprisingly, I guess, I think this is a really good post.
There is an inherent naivety in Ph's posts, as well as an erasure of decades of activism by actual progressive people to advance progressive causes. In a way, Obama's election was a culmination of these forces from SDS to ACORN, PSL/ISO to IAF that have been oriented towards building community power towards progressive political ends. Even in my lifetime, there have been groundswells of progressive policy popularity that have been crushed as they have been institutionalized and dampened by Democratic policymakers from the anti-war efforts of the early 00s to Occupy in the early 10s and BLM in the mid-to-late 10s. For whatever reason, "the establishment" isn't interested in adopting the progressive dimensions of these ideas. Rather, they're interested in the liberal dimensions of these ideas (e.g., how to make police departments more diverse instead of how to make police departments more accountable to the public, which of course also includes making them more diverse).
Therefore, when people who aren't associated with these movements appropriate the messages without the underlying policy muscle to enact them, progressives are understandably skeptical and not happy about it. The first Obama administration is a great example of this, though I'm probably going to get flamed by folks for bringing this up because McConnell or whatever. Dude ran on some very clear progressive platforms that were hugely popular from comprehensive immigration reform to ending military intervention in the Middle East, or even a relatively easy thing to do like close the Guantanamo Bay black site. You can say that his foreign policy was naive - fine, but why couldn't he close Guantanamo? Why did he have to deport more immigrants than any president in US history?
I think what's actually happening here is less an unwillingness to broaden the tent, but rather a skepticism over what that would actually accomplish. Suburban men and women have been around for awhile. Why haven't they been into these progressive causes during these groundswell moments? Why are there currently 13 people trying to primary a WOC progressive democrat who is absurdly popular in her district? Why is the hatred of "the squad" only slightly less prominent among centrists and liberals than it is on the right?
There are clear barriers to enacting progressive policies. Anybody who has been conscious in the last three decades should be able to clearly see this. Ph is right that it's a matter of tactics and mdmh is right that it's a matter of political will, or a lack thereof. A synthesis, I think, is that you have to have support from the party that holds the power before any tactic short of revolution will succeed (and let's be clear, nothing about Sanders's platform was remotely revolutionary speaking tactically). Centrists and liberals want progressives to ignore six decades of evidence (though I'm not a historian) and progressives aren't willing to trust centrists and liberals who claim to be seeing the light regarding progressive causes. The two sides are at loggerheads, but the ball remains in liberals'/centrists' courts because they hold political power currently.
Anyway, you'll all ignore this or pick out one sentence to quibble with, but I thought I'd at least try articulating the position.
