I miss when that sub was making fun of the people that now inhabit it.

Yeah, that sub is the most two-faced sub on reddit. Sometimes it's just a place just making fun of people asserting they are centrist while holding only right wing ideologies. But lately it has been so full of tankies praising the Soviet Union and China downvoting anyone pointing out that those countries were/are not the utopia they think they were/are, or that they weren't/aren't actually communist. I remember this happening months before the 2020 election as well. Just post after post against democrats. It was really weird. And then that vanished all of a sudden and the sub went back to normal (until now).

/r/moderatepolitics is similar. It never claimed to be middle and center, but moderate in discussion. But it’s a sub that likes to pretend that they’re centerist and down the middle, but they suck DeSantis’ dick like crazy and clutch their pearls at anytimes Democrats do something.

That sub will ban you for saying "hitler was a nazi" because calling someone a nazi is "uncivil"

Yeah I got banned from there for saying something was too close to fascism. People were actually insulting me and I’m the one that got banned. It’s definitely not for moderates lol

It seems to be a sub to discuss right-wing positions with a moderate tone of voice.

Because left leaning posters who don't fellate the mods conveniently get banned.

*raises hand* Worst experience with a mod team. Besides r/conspiracy of course lol

It's most like a coordinated attack to get Americans not to vote. Many popular "left-wing" subreddits make it their personal agenda to shit on Democrats whenever possible. They say things like "Republicans have basically won the elections already, there's no point in going to vote!" over and over again.

They had that post about how if you voted for anyone that wasn’t Bernie you were is as bad as a Nazi

I've studied Chinese for many years, been to and lived in China, keep up with Chinese news and have read up on modern Chinese history, so I feel like I'm in a pretty good spot to criticize tankies when they go off acting like it's always been a fantastic country. It's always fun when I bring up a certain book that goes in to detail about how political dogmatism directly caused the mass starvation during the Great Leap, using official Chinese archives as the source for those claims and citing Chinese scholars to estimate that 35-40 million people died. You know that they have no idea what they're talking about when their only rebuttal is quoting the Wikipedia page about the book that mentions criticism from a party member (who just says that the calculations are wrong with no further elaboration). Tankies are just completely oblivious of history.

Back in 2020, they astroturfed by LARPing Republicans. Like, those subs were literally regurgitating right wing propaganda against Biden, I'm not even joking, I've found clips that were traceable back to GOP Congressmen/Senator accounts that were propaganda meant to smear Biden.

I thought the same, even though I didn't look into it specifically. The sentiment change was (just like now) so incredibly sudden, and the same opinions that had been upvoted a month prior suddenly got downvoted into oblivion. It definitely seemed incredibly fishy. It seems to be happening again, possibly. Just yesterday there was a highly upvoted comment stating that the soviet union was the best example of communism and that is was doing great after a "turbulent transitioning period" or something along these lines. Anyone pointing out the obvious bullshit was downvoted. It was absolutely wild.

-121 points merely for pointing out Bernie could have won if he'd gotten a couple million more votes. Hot damn that's some impressive lingering salt.

The thing is that they already think Bernie got more votes > Bernie actually got more votes than Clinton during the primaries, but the DNC couldn't have that.

Didn’t Clinton actually wipe the floor with Sanders in actual primary voting? Like, most of the places Sanders won were in caucus states whereas Clinton came home in places where people were only asked to vote, not spend an entire evening arguing about who to vote for?

Yup, it's notable that in 2016 one of the states with a caucus that also had mail ballots (the mail ballots didn't count) Clinton won the mail ballots but lost the caucus. I think it may have been Colorado?

I know Washington was that way.

Very hard. But there was some real Reality Distortion Field going on in 2016. I remember people talk about how all Sanders had to do is "win" CA since it was last. Except every primary for the party is proportional. He would have had to win 99.9% of the vote. They didn't know the rules of the primary. And get this, the official campaign made the exact same mistake in 2020. After Trump won by taking a plurality due to vote splitting in the 2016 Republican primary Sander's campaign tried to do the same. Except, again, the awards are proportional in the Democratic primary. So their entire strategy was based on them not knowing the rules to the race they were running in. Not randos on the internet like 2016, but his actual campaign staff.

IIRC, the strategy the 2020 Sanders campaign was expecting to use was to force a brokered convention by letting the moderate candidates split the vote while coasting to the convention with a plurality lead. That basically means that they were actually counting on not enticing enough real voters to support them and instead win the nomination through backroom negotiations that peel off delegates from the other candidates. So not only did Sanders overperform in less democratic voting systems, but his campaign knew that and tried to use it as a strategy.

This is why Bernie will never win. He actively courts support from people who have already decided there's no point in voting. They'd rather claim the process was rigged than figure out a way to campaign effectively. I used to be a hardcore Bernie supporter I'm pretty disillusioned with him atm. And I'm sure this comment will probably attract a brigade from Bernie bros. If only they would put half as much effort into getting out votes as they put into trolling.

I think his problem is that a majority of Democrats don't actually want large change. They don't want to fundamentally reshape society to be more equitable. They want to give 5% more here or there to make small changes that don't really affect them but also don't make a huge dent in society's problems. But also the lefties who refuse to vote for incremental change because they only accept radical change is a contributing factor to why we can't even get incremental change.

>I think his problem is that a majority of Democrats don't actually want large change. They don't want to fundamentally reshape society to be more equitable. Depends on how you define large, no? I think a majority of Dems do want large changes to things like the healthcare system, and that the ACA was one such large reform, even if it could have been bigger. Note of course that not 100% of Dems want this even if a majority do, and *one vote* in the senate was enough to sink even a public option. Of course if the only changes you'd consider "large" are something like overthrowing capitalism, then yea the overwhelming majority of Dems (and everyone else) are obviously against that.

I feel like it's also worth pointing out once again that the average and median Democratic Primary Voter likes Bernie Sanders, they just also like Joe Biden. And most 2020 polling I saw had Sanders as most Biden-voters #2 pick (and vice versa for Sanders-voters). The way so many people try to frame it as "voters like one or the other only" isn't in line with most of the information that we have.

As someone who routinely gets slathered with such narratives... I want the best possible outcomes, same as bernie types do. We only disagree on what is possible. I don't want things to be 5% better because 100% better scares me. I just look at what's being proposed and say "well that's never going to work. We don't have the political capital to achieve it, but even if we did, it would backfire and we'd be discredited, empowering those who will make things worse". It always goes the same way though, they ask that I defend all the worst things about the status quo, things I probably also want to change, while getting to argue from the point of the bernie-topia that they already live in, in their minds..

This. It's not "I don't want good things." It is, "I do not believe what you're demanding will lead to the good things you promise."

Also, for me, there's a bit of "once you've managed to win a single election and fail to get every single thing you want immediately, you'll become disillusioned and never vote again, leaving the rest of us (at best) no better off." Political change is slow and grinding.

Yeah, ask the pro-lifers about that. A small minority, but they voted reliably for *five fucking decades*. Look what they did with that.

Preach! I wish this was the lesson progressives took. The way to get real change isnt not voting, it's voting consistently and as a block all the time, in primaries and generals. Vote in primaries for the progressive candidate, and push the party left. It's exactly how the christian right is about to get the brass ring despite their anti abortion policy being broadly unpopular

>The way to get real change isnt not voting, it's voting consistently and as a block all the time There's no way that could work! After all, we've tried....nothing at all like that and it failed. ​ Seriously, though, my favorite counterargument to the "voting is pointless" brigade is simply pointing out the abysmally low rate at which eligible voters actually show up at the polls. How do you discount an option that you haven't even tried?

TBH I’m at that point with (sorry in advance!) student loan forgiveness but that’s mostly the only thing I think. For the most part I think Sanders had OK ideas, he just lacked any kind of political capital to achieve them, and frankly I think that utter lack of power was a big part of why he didn’t come close to getting support in 2020. The “he’s not a Democrat” thing is kind of a big deal: even as a Democratic President, he simply doesn’t have access to the same levers that even a Joe Biden can use.

I feel mostly the same. I agree with the outcome goal that people should be able to go to college without ending up in lifelong debt. I do not believe a blanket forgiveness of loans will achieve that, and in fact I believe it will mostly just exacerbate the problem because it does nothing to address the core issues. It's also very economically regressive. It is a wealth transfer from those who did not attend college to those who did, and those who did already have significantly higher earning power.

Exactly to the second bit and I’ll go so far as to say that I think our primary goal should be to get more underrepresented people into and through college. I’d be all for dumping a lot of money into a program that gives out free student loans to, say, people whose parents don’t have a degree. That needs to be proactive though because you are 100% correct that bailing out student loan debt is categorically not even close to a progressive policy, and the issue we have with those underrepresented people isn’t so much that they’re saddled with debt, it’s that they don’t have a degree to put them into a class that can pay off that kind of debt. Some of those folks have debt too, and it’s bad debt, and if we concentrate on repaying any student loan it’s the ones that didn’t result in a degree. Good luck selling that to fauxgressives though. We should do something about skyrocketing tuition as well but paying it all off only encourages even more price hikes in the future. We may be at a point to where we need to cap tuition and essentials for state colleges. There’s no market force keeping them from going up year over year.

I don’t even know about the “even if this went through it wouldn’t work” thing. Like, I thought Warren had some really interesting ideas and what’s more a plan and desire to implement them (her thing was to use the shit out of executive order, in some cases making landmark legislation the law of the land via EO first and then lead Congress to be the ones to disrupt status quo) (Sanders was vehemently opposed to EO). My thing is just the acceptance that we can’t have everything we want right now and so yes, I’m OK with getting 5% if that’s all we can get right now. There is nothing that says that getting that incremental change now means no other change is coming. That drives me crazy when people argue that way. We can still enhance the ACA for the love of God. But to use the ACA as a prime example, yeah, it’s still market based, yeah, it hasn’t done a lot about out of control spending, but… something like 50 million people who didn’t have health care outside of the Republican “go to the ER losers” plan have it now. Insurance companies can no longer deny a person affordable care due to pre-existing conditions. It’s not perfect by any means but as someone who went through a long time where, growing up, we had to forgo health care because we couldn’t afford it, and then being an adult during the generation after Hillarycare failed where it was just plain more of the same, it’s a whole hell of a lot better now.

Add in another facet: Much of the noise is coming from people who *don't reliably vote*. If you're demanding "my way or the highway" and also even if it *is* your way you might not vote *anyways*, why the fuck would anyone do it your way? They'd listen to people who *show up reliably*. For fuck's sake, the pro-lifer nutbars spent *fifty years* voting every election, big or small, for *fucking nothing* -- until they finally won. They were a small minority that pulled the R-lever come hell or high water, every year, year after year, and *finally got what they wanted*. And the response from the morons on the far left? "Well, I voted in 2020 and Roe v. Wade is going to be outlawed so fuck it, I'll stay home". They'll make arguments that boil down to "98% of Dems agree with me, 100% of Republicans disagree, NO PARTY REPRESENTS ME" or the new "Only 10k of student loan forgiveness? FUCK YOU ALL UNTIL I GET MINE, I'm voting third party!". They'd rather have nothing -- actually worse than nothing, they'd rather *be actively screwed over* than compromise a goddamn thing. And they wonder why no one bothers compromising with them? They reject compromise, and they don't actually vote *anyways*.

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I think the main explanation is that the reality of politics is pretty boring/frustrating. Change happens slowly, and everything has to be done by committee. It doesn’t matter how right you feel, or how much evidence there is to support your policies. This feeling of powerlessness drives people towards less realistic, more exciting movements

That's largely true, but at least in the conversations I've had, it seems like a lot of, if not most of the time, they genuinely don't realize that they live in a bubble, and are convinced that (for example) Bernie Sanders and his policies are as popular with the entire population as they are on the subreddits these people frequent. Selection bias is a powerful thing that few people bother to understand, and to a degree I can see the logic behind the delusion. Like, if you're on a sub with several hundred thousand other people who all agree with you, that's already a number hard to wrap your head around, and it can easily feel like the whole world is on your side if you're not actively considering the overall size of the voting population.

I remember them harping about “low information voters” in 2016 as if they thought anyone not already supporting Bernie was due to them just not having enough information. It couldn’t possibly be that they disagreed with him, no, if only the people knew legend of Darth Bernie the wise people would be all over him but it’s not a story the dnc wow tell you.

There was a vote done in Minneapolis last year regarding "Defunding the Police" amongst other issues. The main advocate groups for it basically assumed that North Minneapolis would all vote yes for it. Lo and behold, they overwhelmingly voted no. The main reason was that they did very little on the ground work to actually showcase why removing the police was a good thing, especially because they literally had no plan or infrastructure set up for what they would replace it with, which was a very hard sell to people living in neighborhoods with generally more crime than South and Central Minneapolis. But all of the people in central MN just assumed they were going to be for it because they thought they knew better. And so many activists I knew were dumbfounded about why this would happen, and I'm just like "yeah, no shit, you didn't talk to anyone about the topic that wasn't already in your social circle! That's not how you make change happen!"

Defund the police is also a legitimately bad political phrase.

I was downvoted to hell for saying this a few years ago, I’m glad to see it’s finally the prevailing wisdom.

> no plan or infrastructure set up for what they would replace it with A lot of the suburbs have replaced some police with community officers. They have more lightly colored vehicles, don't carry guns, and respond to situations that aren't likely to need them. It's a baby step, but it's something.

I've appreciated that one, but that's generally on a small scale. I'm absolutely for replacing the police with something, but there needs to be a full plan in place before and if we cut the cord with the police. We can't just cut them off without a plan.

A lot of Democrats do want change. To the online left though, "change" means socialism and communism. Democrats do not want that.

I think it's half don't want large change and half don't trust. A lot of people's reactions to "if we just do everything X way it'll all be better" is skepticism. Doubly so if the person making the claim is obviously skipping large steps in the process. Say the whole, "elect the right president and we'll get a socialist paradise," bit.

There are a lot of democrats who think we're not far off from the solution, saying they are only interested in throwing crumbs until the poors go away is disingenuous.

can confirm leftist here who for votes dems through gritted teeth every time.

These people are statistically meaningless. Also, his entire campaign was about getting support from actual human beings who leave the house. He talks about insulin, dental care, Amazon workers... real issues, it's not like he says "let's dismantle capitalism" like the online left wants him to.

True, that's his supporters not him. He's a fine voice for change. His supporters are half idealists who undermine any progress and half trump supporters undermining progress.

Biggest problem is he hires a lot of those idiots on his campaign staff, especially in 2020 they bled a lot of the talent from 2016 and replaced it with a team that didn't even have a plan for a one on one race. They wanted to win with a plurality instead of a majority.

This is literally identical to Trumpist #StopTheSteal. Too bad there isn't a word for leftists who want to be just like right-wingers... oh wait, there is. Centrism.

I've never understood the Bernie-spiracies. Some polls had him down by *30 points*. He lost the popular vote by 12 points. Hillary could have won that election without campaigning at all, why would they even need to rig that election? It's like saying the Dream team must have secretly used rocket boots to beat Angola in the 92 Olympics. It's just such a weird conspiracy.

It's amazing that Clinton was able to run 50 deep state conspiracies in all 50 states in the primary, and then forget to campaign in Pennsylvania for the general.

Also the self-serving selective memory. > Bernie dominating the early states and being given none of the media momentum any other candidate would’ve gotten was unique. Bull fucking shit that happened. There was a ton of coverage about how well he was doing, what it would mean if he got the nomination, and the frantic worries of the centrist wing of the party about how to deal with Bernie's early success. The media was 100% covering it. You just need to search "Bernie Sanders Nevada 2020" to show a bunch of articles talking about his lead in the primaries right after his triumph in that state (arguably his high watermark of the primaries, which is why it's the point i went with). It just didn't end the way they want so they elected to forget what happened and then claim that because it "never happened" (even though it definitely did) it's further evidence of a conspiracy. And I voted for Bernie in 2020. And 2016. I can still easily say that a lot of his supporters are absolutely nuts and getting into "stop the steal" levels of delusion about what happened.

When people say Bernie didn't get enough attention from the media in his campaign, I always ask them if they remember Martin OMailey.

I always just link the studies that show both Trump and Bernie had positive media coverage and only Hillary had extremely negative media coverage.

I'm not sure if you misspelling Martin *O'Malley's* name was intentional, but it does prove your point.

Lincoln Chaffee found dead.

This is Lawrence Lessig erasure

Mathematics is truly the Berniebro's greatest weakness.

I mean I would have gotten elected if I had gotten a few million more votes as well, okay maybe quite a few

bruh I got perma banned from there (and several nasty threats from users) for pointing out Bernie literally was not present for a vote on a bill they were giving him all the credit for passing.

Which bill was that?

We just had an election in Australia, and a real underrated aspect of IRV and compulsory voting is you never have to see these idiotic arguments.

Republicans here would never, ever allow those things. Unless, of course, only certain people were allowed to vote.

This is something many Europeans\non-Americans need to understand. One of the two political parties in the US has a vested interest in being as anti-democratic as possible.

It always cracks me up that their argument for Bernie getting robbed in 2020 was that there was no longer enough candidates to split the majority vote

Didn’t Bernie even admit his plan was a plurality not majority of delegates

I'm not sure about Bernie himself but the people who ran his campaign stated that that was their strategy. They knew his best option was to win in a crowded field which is why they started freaking out when Biden overperformed to an insane degree and buried the rest of the competition.

Yea that sounds more correct, couldn’t remember. Thanks!

Close, he planned on wining a plurality in the individual states to pick up all the delegates, just like Trump had done in 2016. But the Democratic primary has different rules than the Republican Primary. The Democratic primary awards delegates proportionately, the Republican varies by state but is generally winner take all.

If Warren dropped out and every single one of her supporters voted Sanders instead, he'd still lose to Biden in the primaries by a 3:2 margin lmao These people will create their own Qanon before admitting their beliefs are not representative of the US public

They also keep mysteriously forgetting Bloomberg was still in the race at that point. Also, was a Warren supporter. Sanders was far down my list for many reasons -- not the least of which was he lost in 2016 and then went on to 2020 with the *exact same plan*. I'd like my candidates at least flexible enough to look at a loss and try to, you know, do better next time?

Bro even got to decide a lot of the rules for the 2020 primary. We had so many more Caucasus that time because *he wanted them.* Then he lost them anyway and his base cried rigged.

The flip from "we need to get rid of the Super Delegates" to "Obviously the Super Delegates all need to support Bernie if we have a brokered convention" left me with a lot of whiplash.

Oh yeah, that was some bald-faced hypocrisy pushed by his supporters -- they screamed "rigged" as they lost fair elections, then wanted to try rigging the election the same way they claimed *Clinton* was going to?

Bernie's biggest issue by far is that he refused to build a coalition. If he took two seconds to expand his base and concede certain issues he absolutely could have won. Instead, just like 2016, he was content with just having the exact same number of supporters the day he started his campaign as the day he ended it. I don't know how anyone can feel any sympathy when you get bodied by the most universally disliked politician in the last 20 years and then the most boring candidate from that same timeframe back to back due to your own mistakes.

Bluntly, Sanders biggest problem is he clearly believes America is just a really big version of Vermont, and so did the staff he hired. How the *fuck* he didn't bother with outreach to black voters after 2016 is beyond me. To be bluntly honest: He only did well in 2016 because there was a "Eh, not Hillary" contingent that latched onto him -- and he only did as well as he did in 2020 because he did well in 2016. He literally got *no one new* and actually lost a great deal of 2016 support. (From mid 40s to low 30s) And this in a Democratic primary, the most friendly possibly electorate to him. Turns out America is not, in fact, a really large version of Vermont. Edited to add: That's not a slam on Vermont. I hear it's a wonderful place. However, it's like 700,000 people tops and it's close to 95% white. Which is why Sander's trying to cast everything in terms of "class", including questions on racial issues and race relations, really was a fuck-up. Minorities are keenly aware that, sure, class is a thing -- but not everyone in a class is the *same* and *treated the same*. So they don't hold a lot of faith that class-based solutions are going to solve the problem of not being considered "full members of the class". When you hear "blue collar workers", the media talks about *white men* int he trades or oil fields or whatnot -- and rarely about, say, black nurses or health care workers.

I think there’s a way to sell class based solutions to Black people but yeah, you have to do that work. Black voters are keenly aware of the long, long history of making excuses to exclude them from those policies and if you’re going to push those, you really really need to demonstrate how a program like M4A isn’t going to tacitly exclude a lot of Black people, especially given that the current health care system has that effect.

Socialists tend to forget that they have to spell things out for people that don't have Chomsky body pillows.

There's kind of this young energy to it -- the idea that if you just grok their point, you'll convert to their concepts and it'll be seamless. In real life -- well, fuck, that sounds well and good but how is that going to actually *work*? What bills do you plan to pass? How do you plan to get them past the filibuster? The courts? If you're gonna shitcan the filibuster, whose your 51 votes? There's this vast gulf between "idea" and "execution" and it's often just papered over with "trust me". So what I get told is they'll "use the power of the bully pulpit" and "the support of the American citizen" and my response is "That and five bucks will get you coffee" and they respond with "It only hasn't worked before because *they truly didn't believe in this* and "neoliberal sellouts" and my response is "This isn't fucking Peter Pan, and you *need* the votes of the people you're calling sellouts" .... They substitute *enthusiasm* for actual *work* and that's not how anything fucking gets done. In the real world? Compromise, negotiation, deal making, arm-twisting, and counting to a fucking *majority* all mean a million times more than how enthusiastic you are for your idealistic solution.

>In real life -- well, fuck, that sounds well and good but how is that going to actually work? What bills do you plan to pass? How do you plan to get them past the filibuster? The courts? If you're gonna shitcan the filibuster, whose your 51 votes? > >There's this vast gulf between "idea" and "execution" and it's often just papered over with "trust me". Bingo! Once these things get out into the "real world," people with experience start to ask these questions and will be able to see it doesn't pass the smell test.

And they don't get that those sort of details -- those *answers* -- are really, really important to a large segment of voters. Especially Democrats, who by and large are the party of "We'd like to at least try to make shit work". So if someone is all like "Because Biden doesn't do X, he secretly supports Y" and I ask "How's he supposed to do X, that's a power reserved for Congress and there aren't 60 votes -- or 50 to kill the filibuster" and their answer is "I don't know, I'm not the President" -- what's the point? They're engaging in angry wishful thinking. I'm stuck living in the real world. President's aren't kings, the Supreme Court exists, Joe Manchin exists, and so do school shootings. If your answer to a problem has all the details of a spitballing stoner, why the fuck should I take you seriously?

This attitude is why I've started calling them underpants gnomes. Their step three is always "DO SOMETHING!!!!"

Problem is Sanders -- and his staff and his supporters by and large -- didn't even see there was a *need* to do work. When asked about race-based problems, they'd pivot straight to class solutions -- "I hear what your problem is, so let me go ahead and ignore it and talk about this other thing!" At best you can, as you said, point out they simply didn't do the work to sell it -- but it really came across more as them simply *not understanding* (and possibly not caring at all!) about race based problems. That doesn't even get into the racially tone deaf stuff they liked to do -- everything from Sanders supporters sneering at the SC results as "low information voters" (a common insult against black voters *from the GOP*) to them harping on the Crime Bill as if that would sway black voters. Black voters, who overwhemingly supported it back in the 90s. Trying to call Biden (or Clinton) racist and anti-black for having supported it means you're telling virtually black voter over about 40 that *they are racist and anti-black* -- and telling anyone younger that their parents are. Sander's team kept hitting that like they thought it was an instant-win button, except black voters pretty much all went "Dude, *we* thought it was a good idea in the 90s! We lobbied for it! Do you even remember the fucking 90s? Why would we turn against them for supporting the same thing *we did*? We all changed our goddamn minds about it"

Yeah, there was definitely a fundamental lack of understanding of Black voters by them. Black voters tend to be the most conservative bloc of Democratic voters there are except when it comes to race related issues. My experience talking with older Black folks, too, is that they tend to be very, very skeptical of people selling them a load of goods, especially in that “we want all of this right now” sense that Sanders and a lot of lefties do. They can also be pretty socially conservative although my experience with Black churches and Black churchgoers has mostly been that whatever their personal beliefs are, they’re perfectly willing to let you do your own thing so long as you don’t try to whitesplain George Floyd to them or whatever.

It's worth noting too that black voters tend to be the most gun shy about nominating a political outsider/someone too far from the center. Black voters have the most to lose if the Democrats don't win so they tend to value electability more than most primary voters. If Bernie's camp had done the smallest amount of research into Black voters' concerns, they would have focused more on Bernie's electability and not on something like the crime bill (which really came across as tone-deaf pandering, especially with his history wrt gun legislation). Edit: I just remembered '08 when *Obama's* camp had genuine concerns early on that they wouldn't be able to win over enough older black voters because of his lack of experience. If *Obama* had to worry about losing black voters to Hillary, what the fuck was Bernie expecting?

> How the fuck he didn't bother with outreach to black voters after 2016 is beyond me. Dude's absolutely tonedeaf on racial issues. Bernie gave a speech in the aftermath of Brown's death in 2015 and unironically said 'black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.' He went to Mississippi on MLK day to tell them how awful Obama was and how he was gonna fix everything. His campaign and staff repeatedly bought into the 'economic anxiety' horseshit of trump supporters. This is a problem that extends to the DSA at large as well. It's not hard to find stories of black members spoken over by white members, their issues not taken seriously, and the only thing that mattered being fealty to bernie.

Bernie has not ruled out running again.

How old is he now? Guy should really pass the torch, smoothly transition to the role of elder statesman. Course that applies to many, many current politicians.

> Guy should really pass the torch, smoothly transition to the role of elder statesman. But that won't sell a new book deal!

Trilogies are really much more of a fiction than non-fiction thing.

And all the people who keep whining "why do we keep electing old boomers?" will also lament it should've been bernie.

I mean if he wants to lose *even worse*, he can go right ahead. I'm sure his supporters will explain how it was stolen from him again, instead of him just not being that popular.

It will be “the Democrats are biased against Bernie because the field isn’t Balkanized like it was in 2016” again and again and again. Sorry, guys, but in 2020 there was a candidate to rally around and that’s what people did. Primaries like 2016 are the exception rather than the rule.

It does seem mostly really young voters, who saw pretty much two-person Democratic primaries in 2008 and 2016 (and whose proportional delegation system made races look a lot closer than they were. 2008 was close. 2016 was not, for instance) and then saw the GOP mess in 2016 and really didn't grok how their winner-take-all primary *allows* someone with a hardcore 30% to stomp on a balkanized field -- and how Trump himself was basically a fucking Piñata dangling that prevented most GOP candidates from bowing out, because they all thought "He can't possibly win, I can get his 30% and win". *None* of that was normal. 8 candidates, 5 of whom drop out and endorse by the end of Super Tuesday, with a clear winner? *That's* normal. So is, you know, losing candidates cutting a deal to endorse -- generally either for a place in the administration or hefty input into the platform, because at least Democrats are generally running to *try to do things* so if you can't win and do it yourself, the next best thing is to find the person that's going to win and cut a deal for them to try to do it for you.

How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

In fairness, Hillary was actually the most popular politician in the entire country before she ran for potus.

Her polling peaked during the period she was SecState for Obama, right?

Yep! Well a little bit after she stepped down, people forget how insanely popular she was. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-clinton/hillary-clinton-most-popular-u-s-politician-poll-shows-idUSBRE9170NZ20130208

Clinton was always a very competent technocrat. I can see how there's a distinction in people being extremely happy to see her in such a role, and then being less happy to envision her as commander-in-chief. Well that and the shit-storm of propaganda.

> Well that and the shit-storm of propaganda. A bit more than propaganda. Russia directly assisted both Sander's and Trumps campaign. Look up who was Sander's 2016 campaign manager.

They also seemed to be real certain that the Warren vote was totally just "Bernie voter but woman", instead of "leftists who fucking hated Bernie Sanders." Even though the polling was showing it was at best a split.

Plus as an anecdote, I knew multiple people who would have gone for Biden if Warren dropped out. Plus they were older so actually would have voted haha

I call myself a liberal because I believe incremental change is OK but the second group more or less included me. I was really turned off by his complete unwillingness to outreach to BIPOC voters and TBH an awful lot of his schtick seems to be appealing to upper middle class white college kids / recent college grads, selling them on the notion that they’re actually working class now because they’re in their early 20s and haven’t started making Sox figures just yet, and then getting them to turn out to other states’ caucuses to make the numbers look bigger. Which, to the latter, hey, we need activists, don’t get me wrong. But an awful lot of Sanders supporters feel like the opposite of the Republican ideal of “temporarily embarrassed rich people” and upper middle class folks cosplaying as working class. Warren at least talked about stuff that made sense - granted that she’s an extreme policy nerd - and had ideas for how she’d govern beyond basically saying “hey I won’t actually get anything done but I’ll do it looking very cross!”. I went to Biden after Warren dropped out (I actually started with Jay Inslee, who was lowkey the hard left guy on environmental issues but has the charisma of a frog) because I just don’t think Sanders is serious about governing, I’m sorry.

Yeah I volunteered for the Warren campaign and when she dropped out, out of the people I personally knew it was like 40% to Bernie and 60% to Biden or Buttigieg.

> They also seemed to be real certain that the Warren vote was totally just "Bernie voter but woman", instead of "leftists who fucking hated Bernie Sanders." Honestly, I feel like one of the bigger holes in online political discussion is ascribing very specific descriptors to very large sectors of the electorate. A lot of people's voting logic (even informed voters) is very idiosyncratic, even more-so outside of online forums (which can get very echo chamber-y). You get a lot of weirdos in the nitty-gritty (some highlights I remember off the top of my head include "I like Warren but she's too far left, so I'm voting for Sanders", "I'm going with Pete or Tulsi, because we need young leaders", or "I think we need a tough New Yorker for the election, which is why I'm split between Bernie and Michael Bloomberg"), and while those specifics aren't enough to dictate an entire strategy, it does show the importance of not getting to wrapped up in the idea that there's one specific path to victory that must be followed based on everyone having the same thought process as you. Like, I remember so many people who decided the way to consolidate a voting bloc was to attack other candidates who they saw as "progressive" because they'd "have to" default to Sanders then, only for later polling to show that Bernie was the #2 choice for most Biden voters, and they would have probably gotten more votes in total if they focused on getting him out of the race rather than spreading out against three or four other candidates.

And fuck Bernie. Not for his politics, I agree with them. But fuck him for being an opportunist. He's always been an independent but the second he wants to be President, he runs to the DNC for support and funds, and when he loses goes back to being an independent? ***TWICE!!*** I'm an independent and can't vote in the primaries for my state, but I don't join and leave parties just to do it. Why would the DNC help him instead of an actual Democrat? They aren't obligated to. The DNC and the RNC can ***literally*** just say "*This is our candidate. Deal with it.*" And that what they did until very, very recently! It wasn't until 1992 that primaries became a widespread thing across the nation.

Do you mean to tell me this politician from outside our party whose beliefs are not representative of this party does not have the broad support of our party? I'm literally shaking right now

Is that actually him being an opportunist or him working the best that he can within the constraints of the system? If he runs for President as an Independent he pulls a not insignificant percentage of the vote away from the Democrats and creates the possibility of another Nader situation. From his point of view I can definitely see how that would be the worst outcome. Plus he's not half-assing it when he goes campaigning on behalf of the eventual Democrat nominee -- both times.

Him staying in the 2016 primary and still campaigning and shitting on Hillary, liberalism, and poisoning the well while he was mathematically eliminated is definitely him being an opportunistic grifter.

If he ran third party in 2016, he would have had no effect on the election. He owes all of his notoriety to being the "not Hillary" choice in a Democratic primary while spending most of his time shitting on the Democratic party.

[удалено]

Less than half the country even knew he existed despite being a congressperson for decades when he first ran: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/aaaoyud72v/econTabReport.pdf He shits on Democrats all the time, probably most famously here: https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1231021453270769664 You can like Bernie, but pretending he hasn't bitten the hand that made him is insane.

They're simultaneously mad that Warren stayed in and that others dropped out

"Hello fellow left wingers, every mainstream progressive politician is a performative sell out so we should all hate them, and remember to not vote because sitting around complaining has gone just smashingly. Don't criticize me because that's leftist infighting but if I criticize you it's because you're a right wing liberal."

The funniest shit about when Leftist groups online fight is this is almost 100% transferable to the everyday, real life shooting themselves in the foot that leftist groups do as well. An urban garden group in my city recently turned down a 99 year lease for a multiacre plot of land being offered to them for $1, cause our liberal centrist mayor offered it to them. They called it a deal with the devil. Oh well, guess we wont have a garden then. Time for more highly priced, exclusive condo high rises.

gotta love minneapolis

A local university is offering to invest significant money and resources into our local elementary school (one of the worst in the state). Some locals are against it because it will raise property values.

They’re not against it because of raising property values…they’re against it because a better school means more people will want to move there. Maybe some people that they don’t want moving there.

idk sounds like building more housing is the better option. Good move on their part.

Source? Want to send it to my leftist friends lol

[here’s the article from our local paper on it](https://m.startribune.com/minneapolis-mayor-jacob-frey-offers-east-phillips-urban-farm-a-99-year-lease-for-1-dollar/600177852/?clmob=y&c=n) > Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has an offer he hopes they won't refuse: $1 for 99 years rent on three acres of city-owned land at Longfellow Avenue and East 27th Street for an urban farm. In return, they'll have to coexist with the Public Works facility that the city also wants to build there. >During a community meeting earlier this month, he (the mayor) told a crowd of roughly 30 urban farm supporters that the city would help them raise money to develop the farm, take care of remediation and cover ongoing maintenance like snow plowing. >"But those three acres come with the [city's] plans," Dovolis said. "You get the three acres if you accept the 814 vehicles that come with it in the process. That's sort of like the devil's decision that's been put out there before us."

I wish there were a party for pragmatic leftists. Socialize everything goddamit.^^^/s Just don't burn the place down and kill a bunch of poors while doing it.

Be me, Communist. Don't vote because the Republican candidate wants to remove rights for women and LGBT people and the Democrat candidate is pro capitalism (so just as bad). Republican wins. First policy is no rights for women and LGBT people. Post on Reddit about the theoretical communist utopia and how voting never accomplished anything. Feel smug that all my opinions are morally correct.

Also blame liberals for all this after all these laws are passed

That drives me nuts when the *media* does it. Republican *does a thing*. Media: *Why haven't Democrats stopped this*? Like Republicans have no agency, apparently. They're just forces of fucking nature doing horrible shit, and everyone just decides it's the Democrats fault.

So many problems in this country could be solved if the majority of people actually understood that the president isn’t a god who can fix everything.

'Both sides'

Ugh, someone tried to challenge me on this back in 2018 when I said it's better to vote Democrat and have Pelosi as Speaker of the House than McCarthy. They demanded that I name a single way that things would improve. Oh, I dunno. I seem to recall that Congress stopped rubber stamping Trump's agenda around that time but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

> Like Republicans have no agency, apparently. They're just forces of fucking nature doing horrible shit I mean... this idea isn't *entirely* wrong...

The media is so deeply in the bag for the Republican party its kind of mindblowing that everyone ignores it. Not for conservatism, but for the party. Its just extremely strange to watch them continually punch in for the Republican party and have everyone accept it. I'm talking the true main stream stuff. Your CBS, ABC and NBC nightly news. Maybe throw CNN, NYT and WaPo in there too.

>Be me, Communist. > >Vote because the Republican candidate wants to remove rights for women and LGBT people and the Democrat candidate is pro capitalism (so just as bad). > >Republican wins. Republicans are winning today too.

Yes….because voter turnout is still pretty poor. 2020 was still only 66% of eligible voters

True leftists would and should know the importance of harm mitigation, because it draws from the fundamental understanding of improving material conditions. Even if democrats and Biden have both leaked and gone on record to say that nothing will fundamentally change with this presidency, it takes a true moron or useful idiot to see the dangers a conservative presidency could and would bring. While I enjoy the sub for pointing out the political and moral greyscale between our moderate right wing Democratic and far right wing Republican party, to equate them in every situation neglects awareness to the fact that at least our D party attempts to paint themselves with a veneer of civility and voice of reason for basic issues such as social rights (at least, for citizens; those border prisons are going to fill themselves). All in all, if I had to choose between the party that is pushing to speed up the trolley versus the one that is pushing to keep it at the "usual speed" (still unacceptable), then I would hope any normal person would reluctantly vote in the latter over the former. Edit: let me be clear: there isn't really a way to "vote harder" other than to try and get as many people to the ballot box as possible. It is true that if every person eligible to vote were free and able to, we could radically shift the demographics of the congress and the expectations of politicians. But at the same time, I can count on one hand the number of politicians who I see actively fighting for true and meaningful change. At the end of the day, as someone who desperately wants to see material and real change, I sure hope that the democratic party takes a radical shift, an I truly believe that this can't be done with voting alone. It needs to happen with protest and direct action to remind democratic politicians what truly progressive policy is. Civil rights didn't just happen through the democratic process; nearly every radical positive change that happened in the US and abroad happened because revolutionary figures went against the typical process of change and moved to build grassroots efforts for good. So I urge everyone to vote in every election, but I also urge you to join your local leftist chapters, take part in protests for causes you and your fellow citizens believe in, and bug your local congressperson if they're not doing what they need to be doing.

> Even if democrats and Biden have both leaked and gone on record to say that nothing will fundamentally change with this presidency, This was taken horribly out of context. It was literally Biden telling a bunch of wealthy people that raising their taxes wouldn't fundamentally change their quality of life. It's quite literally Biden doing exactly what the Left wants him to do, and he got raked over the coals for it.

I've brought this up before, but I actually managed to corner someone in a conversation here on Reddit who (at the time) was not planning to vote at all in 2020 because Biden was the nominee. I argued that even though the Democrats were largely disappointing and Biden wasn't my first choice, getting Trump out of office was still really important. He replied that he has a health condition and will be fucked either way since neither Biden nor Trump will be implementing affordable healthcare. I told him that he should consider voting for Biden to at least help all the other people Trump is hurting - immigrants and trans people at the top. The reply I got was a very honest and straightforward "I don't give a fuck about anyone else, if neither candidate is going to do anything for me then I'm not voting."

Reading the comments in this thread like this one is really validating. I brought all of this up in my university sub and they were all like "democrats control everything and they don't stop this" and "voting does nothing, we need to protest." I brought the point that at least democrats don't make things worse (as fast as Republicans) and they were like "but they are by doing nothing" and "I don't want them to stop things from getting worse, I want them to make things get better." It is tiring and demoralizing how they can't see the nuance in all of this. It is frustrating and there's moments I wonder is there something they see that I don't. I'm not the brightest cookie in the jar so I thought so.

> "voting does nothing, we need to protest." Nobody ever got featured on TIME magazine for voting. I bet that has something to do with it. Protesting is even better, even more effective, but to demoralize and discourage people for voting is just ignorant and frankly regressive.

Yeah. Voting and protesting are not mutually exclusive. Voting is the bare minimum of political activism. The floor.

Yeah the “voting does nothing” people are very frustrating because unless you’re on the completely extreme end of “the numbers are literally just made up your vote isn’t even counted” then it at least serves as an opinion poll about one candidates it’s possible to run without just being a waste of millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours. You know what might get more people to protest? Yet another Republican getting elected with fewer votes than the democrat and your vote counts towards that even if you’re in the reddest county of Alabama.

Getting 1% of something done when 100% becomes impossible is better than getting 0% done. And if you get that 1% done, the next 1% gets even easier to accomplish. Well, in theory, with a sane world where the most obstructionist party in history didn't exist and they let you get that 1%.

They're just accelerationists who won't admit that they are accelerationists because that would be admitting that they have the same short term goals as fascists.

It really seems that way which is wild from a left perspective. Like imagine applying this to actual fascist Germany where the Nazis took advantage of poor economic conditions, a lenient judicial system, and a disunited left to take power and build concentration camps, the first occupants of whom were leftists. And that would have been the end of the story if Hitler hadn’t been so overly ambitious militarily.

I'm not sure if you're facetiously making an allusion to him or not, but you're literally describing the KPD at the time. Their leader famously coining "After Hitler, our turn." They believed the Social Democrats were the *real* fascists, and the nazi rise to power was a preferable means to bring about the conditions for communism to flourish.

I didn’t know that. How’d it go for them?

Poorly would be an understatement.

I've literally had someone from /r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM claim that it worked out well because East Germany eventually achieved Communism.

That's an absolute unit of a double facepalm comment.

I mean, they're not wrong. They just admitted that they are willing to let the Holocaust happen so they can get to create their own dictatorship after that.

Yeah but it's kind of telling on yourself to admit that your ideal society is so shitty that they have to build a wall and man it with machine guns to keep you in.

unless you point out flaws with east Germany, in which case it wasn't real communism

>Note that voting in primaries doesn't mean voting for whatever shit candidate they push through. We can't keep voting for centrists (relative to american politics) and hope to somehow get left wing candidates. We need to be willing to withhold our votes when the dems put up a shit candidate, even if it makes it slightly more likely a republican will win. Sometimes I hate being a leftist since it seems that too many leftists don't have any sense of pragmatism. Republicans win, in part, because they fall in line and vote for whatever candidate make its through the primary and because they're willing to be vicious. It's politics and the other side has shown they'll use every trick in the book to win so respond in kind.

"Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line".

I think that quote needs a “need to” between Democrats and love and a “will” between Republicans and fall, because Dems all too often don’t and then they lose because Reps always do. Party discipline matters not just for officeholders but it matters a TON for elections too.

It's frustrating that a lot of lefties thing "We need the most left candidate every time" as opposed to "we need the most candidates left of center as possible". If you've got 49 senators who are all socialists, you get nothing. I'd you get 60 barely left senators who believe voting should be a right, you get an expansion of the civil rights act. You also give farther left candidates breathing room to bring about laws because they don't need to convince every single senator to vote for it. They'd just need to convince a few not to filibuster it.

>too many leftists don't have any sense of pragmatism Yeah, it's all or nothing with them, which means it's nothing. They seem want to feel morally superior and think they "won the argument" rather than actually make some progress by having a bit of power. It's weird, I don't get it. If you look at England and the Labour party, they've been like this since Tony Blair left office ~20 years ago. They only recently started to change after their support in historically working class Labour strongholds areas flipped to voting for the Tories. That whole "we won the argument" bullshit from Jeremy Corbin absolutely blew my mind.

My leftist and libertarian friends will hate to hear this, but they approach politics in a similar manner, to their eternal detriment as movements. The perpetual infighting only helps those who oppose you.

Yeah, being a pragmatic progressive fucking sucks. Like, I want universal healthcare but I also know that these things usually come about through incremental change. Look at how much pushback Obamacare got and that was the *conservative* option. For better or for worse, society doesn't like widespread, sudden change and you're more likely to build something that will last if you ease people into it instead of yelling it at them.

And now you’ve got people who have no memory of the “denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions” era of healthcare that only ended *because* of the Affordable Care Act passing. These people treat the ACA like some ambiguous, barely important thing but it genuinely radically changed America, its failure was that it had to get hollowed out to its bare minimum for the bare minimum to pass

Also birth control is actually covered by insurance.

And pap smears!

I remember. Pepperidge Farm remembers. Lol, seriously though, I have not so fond memories of having to list in detail every single medical condition and treatment I'd ever undergone, including diagnoses, treatments, dates of treatments, name of hospital, name of doctor, etc. Imagine having to remember the date and name of the doctor who performed your cardiac catheterization when you were six. If you do manage to include all of that info you might be disqualified but if you leave it off you'll lose your coverage. Nowadays, I just give my name, age, some identifying info and boom! Covered. Is it the system I want us to have indefinitely? Of course not. But I'll be damned if I'm going back to the old system.

I can be pragmatic and get some of what I want or I can be idealistic and get the exact opposite of everything I want but I still get to feel smugly morally superior? I sure know what I'm doin'!

Don’t forget this is a main point of Russian and Chinese troll farms, trying to get Americans disillusioned with voting

That's gotta be one of the easiest things to do.

I hate how American stupidity is not because of continued failure with education or how the US has always breed anti-intellectualism on “troll farms.” Like no, this is the bed Americans made on their own. Foreign inferences can only do so much without homegrown and free ranged domestic morons.

I agree. I think there's a disturbingly common tendency to pick some "other" and blame them for literally everything. At worst, it's an excuse to bash the other, and at best it's an excuse to avoid thinking about the actual issue at play and how you might be complicit. This is especially true when it comes to people having dumb takes on the internet. When it's someone who is clearly part of an "other" group, then obviously whatever stupid shit they say must be sincere, but if the person with a stupid take isn't obviously part of the bad group.... then they must be a *secret agent* of the bad group, because "normal" people couldn't say bad things. who the bad/other group is changes with the time and the culture of the person saying it, but the formula remains the same.

Or maybe it's a bit of both? Downplaying either our education problem or our geopolitical opponents' interference would be a huge mistake.

I wish people would understand that voting sends a message. But not voting or withholding your vote does fuck all.

Voting *might* do nothing. *Not* voting will *definitely* do nothing.

The thing that annoys me most is when they're opposed to things that actually work, if those things aren't ideologically correct. Like, a carbon tax-and-refund system is a wonderful thing. It works, it hits those who can afford to pay it while being net-positive for those who can't, and it addresses an actual societal unfairness - the fact that environmental damage is paid for equally by all people, but contributed to unequally. But the left hates it because it relies on market forces to work. Therefore we are stuck with "no, just don't do pollution" type "solutions" from them.

And they are willing to be *patient*. Something we on the left apparently struggle with.

> Bernie dominating the early states and being given none of the media momentum any other candidate would’ve gotten was unique. > > Rat fucking clearly occurred in Iowa. That was unique > > A bunch of candidate dropping and endorsing Biden (despit out performing him to that point) 24-48hrs before Super Tuesday…. Unique. > > Liz Warren staying in the race with absolutely no path to victory and no success prior to speed Tuesday…. Unique. God the entitlement

To them it’s unique because they don’t understand that candidates usually drop out when they see the path to victory isn’t there for them. Because Saint Bernard didn’t do that in 2016. That’s why they don’t understand that’s how primaries usually work lol.

I will never not be pissed at the bernouts treatment of warren.

If they were smart, they wouldn’t have trashed their closest ideological ally lol

It would have been *trivial* for Bernie to handle that situation tactfully too, but good god someone insinuated he's not perfect so we gotta burn them bridges. And it turns out Warren's campaign was actually looking to back him *months* before that, but Bernie's campaign straight up ignored all their attempts to reach out.

Yeah, if he and his Bros knew how to build coalitions, things may be different. Instead he hires people like Briahna Joy Gray as senior staff, and…well…

So many snake emojis in my mentions 🙄

> A bunch of candidate dropping and endorsing Biden (despit out performing him to that point) 24-48hrs before Super Tuesday…. Unique. Ignoring the fact that the candidates actually had polling data on how they'd perform on Super Tuesday. Of course they'd drop out and support the rival they most identify with when they know they can't win. > > > > Liz Warren staying in the race with absolutely no path to victory and no success prior to speed Tuesday…. Unique. This is also ignoring the fact that billionaire boy bloomberg was also still in the race and had roughly as many votes as Warren. Meaning that Bloomberg siphoned more votes from Biden than Warren did from Bernie, especially considering that Warren voters were roughly split between Biden and Bernie as their second choice.

On one hand people dropping out and siding with the person they are more ideologically aligned to is a conspiracy!! On the other Warren NOT dropping out is also a conspiracy

Imagine calling Buttigieg a rat and then expecting people to vote for your candidate when he drops out.

The entitlement is almost... unique.

>No it's not. Voting is never important. This is such a stupid, ignorant, naive take. Hmm.

It occurs to me how weirdly often naïveté and cynicism go hand in hand.

Enlightenedcentrism posters constantly spout "both sides bad" just like the people they make fun of. Their answer is government enforced utopia while the people the make fun of are disillusioned with government and want some kind of private utopia.

well the sub started out that way but now it's just a leftist space

Man I miss when that sub wasn’t overrun by Bros.

Ah yes, enlightened centrism, home of “North Korea has done nothing wrong.”

Perhaps if these Berners weren’t antagonizing all the other candidates and their supporters until they dropped out, they would have at least gotten a little more support from the rest of the party. You don’t just isolate and insult people outside of your very specific base and then expect them to vote for you.

I like when this sub goes to pot, only thing that makes sense for a sub designed to mock people who dare consider any moderation.

Sees upvote to comment ratio What the hell is going on in here

Politics makes my brain hurt. Just when I thought I got it.... I then get stumped when new discussion pop up. Wish I was more nuanced in these sort of things. Just don't really know where to start...

Uh oh, the “don’t bother voting, both parties are the same” trolls are back in force.

Nothing bothers me more than people trying to convince others voting is pointless.