General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Meet Bernie Sanders' 2018 challenger [View all]JCanete
(5,272 posts)public pressure or demand for said issues to be pushed. You say that pushing those issues, being steadfast and demanding that the Democratic party give at least lip service to them has failed, but that's ridiculous. You simply do not know what the Democratic party would look like had these pressures not existed...had these issues not found their way into public discourse. Democrats have learned their lesson. They don't stick their neck out on things that don't already have a groundswell of support, and they don't alienate the people who help them to get elected unless they have enough incentive to do so. Its too hard and politically suicidal.
Not to mention, it is disingenuous to suggest that the left has failed when you KNOW that it is working with a shoe-string budget compared to more moderate, corporately tied in platforms. OF COURSE the challenge is herculean. OF COURSE the forces against them are well funded and powerful, and they don't just exist in the GOP. What should piss you off, but apparently doesn't, is that Democrats have done their share of scuttling progressive messaging over the years. They have leant their weight towards that so called failure that you accuse the left of. Your solution is not to support the left in its efforts, but to declare it dead and a failure because the task is hard and success has been depressing...shit why don't we declare the Democratic party dead at this point too? What have we done lately? Why not declare the fight against global warming dead? What have those lame scientists accomplished but a lot of noise that makes us feel bad?
People at the convention were booing for entirely different issues than what you are stating. They felt as if the thumb was on the scale, and of course it was. Not nefariously per say, but because people within leadership have a genuine bias. They have a brand that they think is right and effective, and they aren't too keen to do something that mucks it up any favors. Nothing about those boos automatically indicates that these people thought the GOP and the Democrats were on par.
And one last thing. It only matters if the Democratic party wins, if it is a progressive party. If it is a conflicted party, when we win, we show middling results, and then we lose. We lose big. We've lost a 1000 seats in down-ticket elections, not because people on the left are attacking our brand, but because our brand is nowhere near as unimpeachable as it should be. And our deliverances aren't as bullet proof as they should be. When we pass something on party lines, why is it weak sauce that still hurts some average americans because we couldn't do what needed to be done? There would have been no referendum on Obamacare in this last election if we'd just done it right. People would have realized far sooner that they liked this public option.
We refuse over and over again to take the wind out of Republican sails. We refuse over and over again to distinguish ourselves like night and day from the republicans and their lobbyist connections, and that makes it nearly impossible for us to throw stones at them for being bought and paid for. We refuse to take the fight to the rich and the media they own, because hey, we want them to be our friends, and we need their support next election, and for that, they continue to use their tools to make our Party look bad in the name of their corporate agendas.