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The Democratic Party Left Me Behind

And this is where mdmh really has a point:

Do y'all just not believe in anything until you have seen what the president or congressperson with the D next to their actually ends up doing in office?

it's okay to have expectations for politicians or to believe in a politics that isn't purely modeled on cynical "pragmatism."
 
Pragmatism is not the most cynical perspective on offer here.


And I don’t follow any particular politician or party.
 
ConnorEl said:
Who is claiming anyone is perfect?




No one.
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He didn't need to wave a magic wand to be a president that governed like Obama the candidate claimed that he would govern. I stanned for Obama hard. I canvassed for him in three states, listened to just about every speech the guy made, and - for the first time in my life (I was in my early 20s at that point) - really studied his policy proposals. I was a lot younger in 2007 and definitely naive, but it's not easy to reconcile Obama the candidate with Obama the president on a lot of aspects of policy.

When you look at Obama-era immigration policy (via ICE), education policy (via DOE), and urban policy (via HUD), what Trump has been able to accomplish is really not all that surprising. I'm not sure an American president can avoid imperialistic foreign policy, but drone warfare and the further decimation of civil liberties in the name of national security really aren't great looks.

Maybe not detaining and deporting families, supporting (and funding) public education, and supporting (and funding) affordable and public housing requiring the waving of a magic wand. When I was canvassing for Obama in 2007 and 2011, I didn't really think that this was the case.
 
ConnorEl said:
I agree, it’s too bad he didn’t wield a magic wand.
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It's not idealistic to believe in something. It may be idealistic to let your beliefs control your practice (e.g., the way that many of you characterize voting third party in the age of Trump), but it is not idealistic to have politics that don't perfectly match up with the establishment of a party (which itself is an ideology, albeit a pretty flimsy one).
 
You will believe what seems right to you. That’s not necessarily idealism.

Idealism implies a disconnect from reality. That’s not = to cynicism.

None of this is simple, IMO.

I posted the link to the Obama speech not because I think he is a perfect person or was a perfect president. But because I think it contains a lot of wisdom and proper and reasonable encouragement.
 
I agree with a lot of this. But Progressives missed a chance. Obama could have been a bridge. Any young Progressive candidate had a good chance of beating Hillary and Trump.
 
PhDeac said:
I agree with a lot of this. But Progressives missed a chance. Obama could have been a bridge. Any young Progressive candidate had a good chance of beating Hillary and Trump.
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If we have learned anything from the last election cycle, then it's that I'm not sure that progressive candidates had a chance. I mean, hell. Clinton wouldn't even pick a progressive VP. Sherrod Brown has a profile as Trump-voter friendly as you could have gotten last election. The fact that Sanders did so well is less an indictment of progressives, IMO, and a bigger indictment on the stranglehold that the Clintons had over the Democratic Party.
 
PhDeac said:
I agree with a lot of this. But Progressives missed a chance. Obama could have been a bridge. Any young Progressive candidate had a good chance of beating Hillary and Trump.
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Who would’ve been severely hamstrung by a Republican Congress.
 
Maybe we needed the debacle of Trump to get a better politics growing from the ground up.

I don’t know. I hope it happens.
 
ConnorEl said:
Maybe we needed the debacle of Trump to get a better politics growing from the ground up.

I don’t know. I hope it happens.
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This is where I'm at, too, and why I think AOC's victory has been such a powerful symbol for younger progressive Democrats.
 
I've said this before - I love the idea of Obama. I loved the hope and optimism that Obama based his campaign on, how he temporarily represented the country. How proud he made America. I did not like his governance. He was not the progressive President that his campaign and his rhetoric made him out to be. Most of that is the fault of him losing congress after 2 years, but some of that fault is just him being a centrist, beholden to his Republican peers.
 
Strickland33 said:
If we have learned anything from the last election cycle, then it's that I'm not sure that progressive candidates had a chance. I mean, hell. Clinton wouldn't even pick a progressive VP. Sherrod Brown has a profile as Trump-voter friendly as you could have gotten last election. The fact that Sanders did so well is less an indictment of progressives, IMO, and a bigger indictment on the stranglehold that the Clintons had over the Democratic Party.
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Completely disagree. “Not Hillary” was pretty popular. A young progressive would have done better than Bernie. Much better.


myDeaconmyhand said:
I've said this before - I love the idea of Obama. I loved the hope and optimism that Obama based his campaign on, how he temporarily represented the country. How proud he made America. I did not like his governance. He was not the progressive President that his campaign and his rhetoric made him out to be. Most of that is the fault of him losing congress after 2 years, but some of that fault is just him being a centrist, beholden to his Republican peers.
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Obama wanted to be Jackie Robinson. He didn’t realize that a black man cannot win the respect of conservatives without kowtowing to them. Obama sought a compromise that was impossible. Now we know.
 
You guys act like Obama was in control when McConnell obstructed more bills than anyone in history.

Obama lost Congress for passing the most progressive healthcare bill in history. Medicare was for one group of people. ACA was for everyone. ACA didn't go far enough, but it went farther than any other bill in US history.

My bad, if you don't get EVERYTHING you want, then it's useless.
 
PhDeac said:
Completely disagree. “Not Hillary” was pretty popular. A young progressive would have done better than Bernie. Much better.




Obama wanted to be Jackie Robinson. He didn’t realize that a black man cannot win the respect of conservatives without kowtowing to them. Obama sought a compromise that was impossible. Now we know.
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You’re misunderstanding me, I think. The DNC effectively benched a progressive challenger to Clinton, Sanders filled the void, and the rest is history.
 
RJKarl said:
You guys act like Obama was in control when McConnell obstructed more bills than anyone in history.

Obama lost Congress for passing the most progressive healthcare bill in history. Medicare was for one group of people. ACA was for everyone. ACA didn't go far enough, but it went farther than any other bill in US history.

My bad, if you don't get EVERYTHING you want, then it's useless.
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Obama did pass the most progressive health care bill in history. And it wasn’t even all that progressive. But it was a great, if imperfect, move in the right direction. And he was endlessly vilified for it by the lying Pubs. And their strategy of dishonestly vilifying Obama succeeded, to our national shame.
 
No. Young Progressives lacked the balls Obama had. The DNC can’t bench someone who wants to run.
 
Interesting piece: Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism

”We think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism, but we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child — technology.”

This is how Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and a managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm, Thiel Capital, began a recent video for BigThink.com. In it he argues that technology has so transformed our world that “we may need a hybrid model in the future which is paradoxically more capitalistic than our capitalism today and perhaps even more socialistic than our communism of yesteryear.”

Which is another way of saying that socialist principles might be the only thing that can save capitalism...
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