|
Kilroy posted:You can say the same of any group that "identifies" as a thing because most people don't do that. The thing is that much of the Democratic leadership is elected, which means that most of the people already running the party have good reason to think they know a thing or two about winning elections. If leftists had a much better record than centrists at winning elections, then the DNC membership would be mostly made up of progressives, and they wouldn't have to beg for the DNC chair or any other concessions because they'd be the undisputed leaders of the party and be able to choose whoever they like to hold the chairmanship. If progressives have the magic touch at winning elections, then we've got to go prove it, not sit around saying it over and over again like anyone will care.
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 01:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 11:42 |
|
|
Majorian posted:
Except that the only people he has to win votes from are the DNC members, so the only way the left can "hold him accountable" is if they take a bunch of DNC seats, and that's not going to happen if they swear off the Democrats in disgust. Kilroy posted:You're not wrong, but it's mostly because you've stated a tautology, or very nearly one. Yes, most Democratic leadership is elected, and so the people voting for chair are the ones clever or fortunate enough (in terms of district, etc) to hold on to their office while the Democrats have been getting their asses kicked up and down the ballot for the last decade. If they continue to presume they know a thing or two about winning elections even as their party is in its weakest position in perhaps 100 years, then we are in deep poo poo. Will they just keep thinking that until there aren't any of them left? If leftists are so much better at winning elections, why haven't they won all the elections and taken over the party yet? If the choice is between having a centrist Dem in the seat or a right-wing Republican, that doesn't sound so good for leftists. I'm sick of hearing that centrists are terrible losers who can't win elections while leftists are wonderful election geniuses with highly motivated supporters, when the reality is that the Dems have a lot of centrists who've won a lot of elections and a few leftists who've won a few elections. Sure, centrists have lost seats. So have progressives. Instead of whining that the centrists should listen to the left because they lost once after decades of winning, why doesn't the left go out and beat the centrists? Election after election, the left has promised that next time, next time, they'll win a bunch of seats - you'll see! You'll see, you mean old centrists! I'd really like that to happen, and I am loving sick of the left being all talk.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 03:14
|
|
I think Perez is going to do his best to at least pay lip service to the Sanders wing of the party, because his primary concern is his continued political survival and relevance. Left-Dems need to watch him like a hawk and hold him accountable for his actions. If they do, I think there's a good chance that he will turn out to be a decent-enough DNC chair.
|
Majorian posted:Wait a second, so that somehow negates the policies that she supported in the past? I'm not sure it's my brain that is broke here... Apparently, since the same people who had the most right to be mad about those policies voted for her rather than her opponent.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 03:19
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:While I don't disagree that a lot of people don't understand the reality of how hard it is to sell leftist policy, I think that framing it as "if the left was so great, why don't they just win already" ignores the structural and systemic reasons why that hasn't happened and is in fact quite hard. Those structural reasons were always there, though, and it was always hard. Leftist organizers like Eugene Debs and MLK didn't whine passively about how they couldn't do anything because the system wasn't giving them enough support - not even when the system put them in jail. They recognized that their task was to fight the system, not to beg the system for influence. Being a leftist used to be grounds for ending up in prison or being blacklisted from entire industries. Leftist organizing used to be not only illegal but downright unconstitutional. Organizing a political movement and coordinating mass action isn't easy, but it's easier now than it's ever been before. The fall of the left isn't because the system got more hostile, it's because the left stopped trying. I do realize that it's difficult, but previous leftist movements accomplished much more with much less. Majorian posted:I don't think it's a given that they fully knew her record as a political figure. If that's the case, then her opponent did a piss-poor job of explaining to them why they shouldn't vote for her. Dan Didio posted:Promising a vague, incremental future victory and stage for leftist politics has been the Democratic party's inner stick to swat at disruptors for decades now. It's also been the left's stick to swing at the center: the promise that next time, they'll totally win all the elections and take over the Democratic Party and usher in a socialist utopia. Totally. Next time, you'll see! Honest, we just weren't trying up till now! If the left doesn't want to hang their hopes on vague promises from centrists, all they have to do is win elections until they outnumber the centrists. If they can't do that, it's only natural for them to be at the centrists' mercy.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 05:34
|
|
|
Kilroy posted:What you don't seem to understand, somehow despite quite a lot of really glaringly obvious evidence, is that the Democratic party is not able to reliably win elections, and if they're going to keep doing the same old poo poo that results in losses, then the time to start building something else starts precisely now. Swap "centrists" and "leftists" and you've basically got the Democratic Party circa 1990. The centrists got entrenched in the first place because they argued that the Democratic Party was losing elections in the Reagan era because they were too far left...and instead of whining to party leadership about it, they ran centrists for office and won.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 06:04
|
|
|
VROOM VROOM posted:It's really interesting to see people blaming millions of voters making their own individual decisions for Democratic losses, rather than the influential individuals or small groups who are or should be aware of how their decisions affect how they are perceived and how this will affect their support/turnout. Obama in 2008 was seen, at least by the average voter, as a progressive. Clinton in 2016 was not. Someone in this thread said before the vote that there wasn't that big a difference between Perez and Ellison. So, why not pick the one that was endorsed by the progressives in the party? If you can answer that, you might know what's really important to them as well as why they keep losing. They didn't see any reason to pay any attention to the endorsement of one particular progressive. Why would they? They've been shown no evidence that progressives are better at winning elections, nor have they seen any evidence to back up claims that the last few years of Democratic losses are due to fundamental ideological flaws rather than weak messaging and awful campaign strategies. If we want to convince the center that progressivism is better, we're going to have to prove it. Obama in 2008 didn't win because progressives projected their beliefs onto them, he won because he was an extremely charismatic campaigner who was very willing to make promises he couldn't keep, running against the successor of a guy who mired the US in an unpopular forever war and tanked the economy two months before the election.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 06:21
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:Yeah this is emblematic of the dishonest arguments put forth in this thread. Compromise? Who the hell was the non-compromise option to the left of Ellison? Clearly it wasn't Buttigieg, since he ran to Ellison's left and no one cared.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 06:34
|
|
oh see progressives are hypocrites who compromise their supposed principles. You should have nominated a wild-eyed outsider and given no quarter if you wanted us to take you seriously."
|
Kilroy posted:Do you understand what a compromise is? If "the Bernie wing" had also run someone to the left of Ellison, then it wouldn't be a compromise. Who the heck, on the stage of national politics, is to the left of Ellison, other than possibly Sanders himself? Who was the more ideal candidate that the Sanders wing really secretly wished they could have but decided to compromise down to Ellison instead? Who was the left-of-Ellison candidate that the Bernie wing would have run if they weren't interested in compromise? Because as far as I can tell, there wasn't one, and there wasn't even a hint or peep of Ellison being a "compromise" candidate until after Perez gave him the deputy chair position - when he first announced, he was well to the left of anything progressives had expected or hoped for. It's pretty obviously a new narrative. Majorian posted:True, and I think leftists overstate their case when they say that the Dems did nothing with their supermajority in 2008...when it really wasn't a supermajority in any meaningful way. Byrd and Kennedy were on their deathbeds, Manchin was no help whatsoever when he replaced Byrd, Lieberman was devoutly terrible, etc. It's far more than Republicans had when they started the Iraq War, passed the Bush tax cuts, and so on. In 2001, the Senate was 50/50 and the Republicans had only a nine-seat advantage in the House. The problem wasn't actually the numbers, it was the will to fight: Obama was unwilling to fight for his programs in 2009 and 2010, and the Dems were feeling zero pressure from the left. I'm sick of hearing the "well, the Dems don't really have a supermajority" line, because all too often I was hearing it from a so-called leftist who was using it to explain why we shouldn't be mad at Obama and the Dems for watering down the stimulus, dumping the public option, and then making the rest of 2010 about austerity. SKULL.GIF posted:So why did Obama, Biden, Jarrett, and like half a dozen other figures lobby for days and constantly pressure electors behind the scenes to try to suppress Ellison? Because they thought Perez would do a better job? It's entirely possible to come up with reasons to like Perez over Ellison without concluding that the only possible reason must be an establishment conspiracy to steal power from the people...just like it's theoretically possible to come up with reasons to like Ellison over Perez besides "Bernie endorsed him". Frankly, I don't understand at all why so many people think that incredibly popular ex-president Barack Obama, who won two landslide victories and reshaped the entire party in his image over eight years of rule, even thinks he needs to defend his influence from the Sanders wing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2017 20:15
|
|
|
thechosenone posted:Which makes me wonder why they would suddenly be sweating it now, when they wouldn't have earlier? "Votes shall not be taken by secret ballot" doesn't necessarily mean "we will post the full and detailed list of votes on our website". People are forgetting what secret ballot actually means - it means that no one knows what the votes were, and that they are completely and totally anonymous. That's clearly not the case in the DNC election: someone knows who voted what, so the ballot wasn't secret. It's just that no one's released that not-secret list to the public. Similarly, "open meetings" just means "if anyone shows up at the door to this meeting and wants in, let them in", not "distribute literally everything that happens to the entire nation". Is it transparent to the public? No. But it does obey the bylaws.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 19:18
|
|
|
thechosenone posted:but if a paper ballot and a secret ballot both do not require us to know who voted, then is there any difference other than we know the result? Knowing the number of people who voted for which person is the transparency? A secret ballot requires nobody to know who voted, because the votes are completely and totally anonymous. If somebody knows who voted what, then the ballot isn't secret, even if everybody doesn't know who voted. Why are secret ballots banned? It's probably not for accountability to the public, given that that isn't exactly what the DNC is all about. Rather than that, it's probably for accountability to the members - it allows votes to be challenged and verified if someone suspects foul play of some sort in the vote. KomradeX posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_methods_in_deliberative_assemblies If a ballot is signed with the name of the person who cast it, then it's inherently not a secret ballot.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 19:25
|
|
|
thechosenone posted:Alright I get it. I think they should set up so that it is public knowledge who voted though. I acknowledge that is not the current state of affairs though. I appreciate your patience with helping me understand, as I know that it is frustrating to say the least. It makes a lot more sense when you remember that the DNC isn't really an organization that is designed to be directly accountable to the public. It's a forum for backroom dealing and fundraising strategy and general party governance, which has been around since before the Civil War. Typically, the DNC chair isn't even contested - when the party holds the presidency, the president gets to appoint whoever they like to the position without even holding an election (which is how we got DWS), and when the party doesn't have the presidency the candidate has usually been agreed upon by backroom dealing long before the vote. It's quite rare for the chair election to even be a real election, let alone one that the public cares about. Hell, most people don't even know who their local DNC delegates are. With all that in mind, it's no surprise that the rules are structured that way. If you disagree, that's fine, but that's why the DNC is the way it is today, why the failure to publicly release the details isn't even slightly a departure from the usual, and why changing it would mean more than just modifying a single rule. If you think the DNC should be more transparent, that's fine, and I don't disagree - but saying "the evil DNC broke their rules and traditions by going out of their way to keep the votes secret" involves taking some real liberties with the facts. For now, if you really want to know who your DNC delegates voted for this time, show up to a state party meeting and ask them. Progressives should be attending those meetings anyway if they want to have any say in the DNC.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 20:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 11:42 |
|
|
thechosenone posted:That is fine, and I'm sure Perez will support running new candidates in those seats, right? I'm pretty sure the DNC will support whoever wins the primary, though the level of support may vary based on their polling and such. I realize that's not really what you were asking, but the DNC's job is to get more Democrats in Congress, not to primary sitting Dems. If progressives want to primary Manchin, that's fine, but I don't see what the DNC has to do with it. Lightning Knight posted:The Tea Party began life as an astroturf campaign and enjoyed consistent institutional support from people like the Koch brothers, as well as the existence of Citizen's United. The left doesn't have these things and while the Tea Party is an interesting test case I don't think "be more like the Tea Party" is categorically useful advice to leftists. The Tea Party was astroturfed, but the people and the anger were real - billionaires just poured money and media and political consultants into the fledgling movement. Sure, there's fewer billionaires willing to prop up a socialist movement like that, but that's always been a problem that the left has to deal with. What happened to "money doesn't matter, big donors don't matter"? Also, the Tea Party mostly primaried moderate Republicans in safe red districts and states, rather than trying to push the purple-state Republicans right. The Little Kielbasa posted:But when the establishment needed people to campaign against Bernie, Perez campaigned against Bernie. And when they needed someone to bring down Ellison, he answered the call. How many prominent progressives does Perez need to shank on the establishment's orders before it's OK to call him an establishment stooge? Do we really need to see a photograph of Perez shoving Liz Warren into Podesta's trunk before we make that judgment? How many progressives does Ellison need to shank on the establishment's orders before it's okay to call him an establishment stooge? Neither of them have clean knives. The coal industry lobbyist giving Perez's nomination speech makes abundantly clear exactly what Perez is - a carefully-targeted response to some of Hillary's most notorious campaign missteps, like "we're going to put coal miners out of work". Obama didn't put Perez forward because of an establishment conspiracy to undermine the left, he did it because he thought Perez would appeal more to the Rust Belt factory workers who decided the election in Trump's favor.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 23:29
|
|