So are you saying the historic victories of 2018 in the House were bad because only “centrist” candidates were recruited and won?
a) the 2018 election victory was hardly “historic”.
b) no, I didn’t say that. If I said that you would have seen those words used. Because that’s how I say things.
c) The long-term problem is that the DCCC actively suppresses liberal voices that could win elections and cares only about fundraising ability. And, to be honest, they have a better feel for the desires of fundraisers than the desires of the voting public. They view electioneering as a business. The product they sell is policy, the buyers are the donors, and the means is using voter manipulation to accept the candidates that will provide the product to the buyers.
d) “Would failure to win the majority back have been preferable with “purer” candidates who lost?”
Yeah, you guys always frame things this way, don’t you? But the fact remains that, if you graph “liberalism” and “winning” over the past 75 years, they correlate for Democrats. By this I mean that the party was far more successful when it was more liberal. But we’ve let some Trojan horses into the party and they have been systematically destroying liberalism from the inside since the 1980s.
Some tells about these anti-liberals. They don’t recognize liberalism. They use the word “pure”, and with scorn. As if trying to fight for party values is somehow immoral and/or ill-conceived. Of course, again, these are the people who have been running the party while it’s been getting consistently less and less popular.
The anti-liberals don’t want policy debates on the merits of any position. They are, essentially, terrorists. They constantly build up the GOP to be implacable foes that cannot possibly be beaten, and then make sure that their prophecies come true by knee-capping any liberals who have the temerity to challenge the status quo.
That’s how we’ve now reached a place where a Republican President is flagrantly ignoring the law, every single day, and yet the biggest debate for “centrists” is “How do we make sure he’s not impeached?”
It’s madness.
Why is it happening? Because for the centrists, control of the party is the only really important thing. Because, ultimately, they serve at the pleasure of the wealthy donors, and, more than anything else, the wealthy donors want liberals to lose. And it’s much easier to ensure that result if you hack the Democratic party and put stooges in charge than if you only run unpopular candidates as Republicans.
We can consult the administration of President Henry Wallace about that, huh?
We could consult his boss, who actually won. Four times.
If today’s Democratic party were anything like FDR’s, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re currently in.
Funny how to find a candidate too leftist to win you had to go back to the 1940s, while I only have to go back to 2016 to illustrate the failure of centrism. But hey, I never self-advertised as a “purist”. That was your straw man. My point was this:
They may feel that they get short-term tactical victories, but as a long-term strategy it’s disastrous.
But you completely ignore consideration of the long-term. Because, for centrists, there is no long-term strategy. Rather, there is a tactic: to frighten the left with the specter of right-wing control, while ensuring that no actual leftist policies ever get implemented.
Sad thing is that the center has pumped up the right so much that even the center believes its own stories. How else do we have an incompetent, narcissistic buffoon in the White House? Where are all the #Resistance leaders? Turns out the hash tag was only for raising money, not for supporting impeachment. Because that could “rebound” - in some fashion that purportedly would be worse for Democrats than simply punting on 2nd down.
