11 ms·

The Democrats need to wake up and stop pandering to their extremes

22 points by runeks 4y ago

willis936 4y ago
Pot meet kettle. The right has seen recent success because they have less infighting and are more welcoming of their extremes. The left can't even agree on what they consider progressive.
- krapp 4y ago
  The ratchet effect is real. Republicans move the country further and further right, even when it takes an attempted coup or risks a Constitutional crisis, and Democrats block counter-movement to the left at every opportunity. It's because we don't have a true left in the apparatus of power in the US, even though the actual population tends towards the left. The Democrats aren't leftists, they're center-right at best, basically Conservatives minus the Evangelical Christian veneer, strongly pro-military, pro-capitalism, pro-status quo. The few actual leftists like AOC and Bernie are allowed to piss and moan about things but never to do anything to risk upsetting the apple cart.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    I'm not convinced it is real, because that's the same story the right has been telling about the left since Bill Clinton. Slippery Slope! Overton Window! Ratchet Effect! I've been hearing those rants for more than 30 years, though that repeated complaint has recently come in to fashion on the left among the young. Repetition makes something seem true, but it does not truth make.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yunruse 4y ago
The problem with politics is that it’s rarely made of binary issues, and yet the voting experience so often is. But the democratic process of the US (and to some extent the UK) is that inevitably two parties will appear, and this sort of forces this broad-church experience, smushing it all into one “left and right” axis [0]. Even if we smush things onto an axis, the Overton window of people’s views [1] can probably be approximated as a bell curve, and so it stands to reason that the Republicans, too, are full of extremes, and also full of moderates. Both parties would benefit from the clarity of being split up, I think; it’s just genuinely unclear how the process could be changed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- willis936 4y ago
  The simple solution is voting system reform. The two party system is a symptom of first-past-the-post voting. Switch to plurality voting and suddenly the quality of representation skyrockets. The system isn't designed to maximize equitable representation and is very resistant to change.
  - Chris2048 4y ago
    But things that the two-parties agree on (to not implement) will have very little political willpower to implement. And a system that gives more power to parties that are not the two-parties is such a thing.
    - willis936 4y ago
      That's the "resistant to change" part. NH has the highest number of state reps per capita and three plurality bills were shot down this year by an overwhelming majority. From the richest superdelegate to the smallest fry: every politician toes the line right now. https://www.concordmonitor.com/Should-NH-adopt-ranked-choice-voting-44877882 https://www.concordmonitor.com/Should-NH-adopt-ranked-choice...
  - yucky 4y ago
    That is often repeated, but not based on facts. Several nations have FPTP voting and more than two parties, including Canada and the UK.
    - moistly 4y ago
      Canada is very rapidly heading towards a two-party system. The Greens barely count as a party, the NDP have joined forces with the Liberals, the Conservative-Reform Alliance Party is desperately trying to subsume the breakaway PPC Party, and the Bloc is specific to one province. Every election boils down to a choice between two parties: Liberal and Conservative. When the Conservatives are too socially regressive (“barbaric cultural practices hotline”, Pierre Poilievre) many NDP voters hold their nose and vote Liberal. If the Conservatices continue down their current path, Canada will inevitably become a strictly two-party country: the NDP will cease to exist as an alternative.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
All the opinions, topics and policies summarized under the term "clownworld" (some call it far right dogwhistle) are already leading to a massive, conservative backlash. Coupled with economic struggle for the dying middle class this is a disaster.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  Dying middle class?
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Opinion online seems to oscillate between "the middle class is changing" and "the middle class is dying". I consider the second to be true. Primarily driven by the housing cost crisis with more and more people staying rent slaves til death. Due to the mixed sentiment one could argue forever for both directions.
    - hirundo 4y ago
      There is a third online opinion on that with a significant following: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappearing-into-the-upper-middle-class-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...
flave 4y ago
What's strange about this is that this goes against a preliminary game theory/optimisation analysis of how the system should work. Hotellings Law (https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2692.htm https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2692.htm) means that when there are two competitors on a spectrum, they will move closer and closer to one another to be as competitive as possible. Even passing beyond the other until they are both either side of the center. You have two ice cream trucks on a 1D beach. |-----1-----------2-| Ice cream truck 2 captures all the business on its right, and 1 captures all the business (more) on it's left. Then they split the central. area 50:50. |-----12------------| Now 2 moves all the way to be next to 1, and takes all the central space (including what it used to have on the right. |------21------------| 1 now comes to the side the grab almost all of the right hand side, surrendering the less valuable left. |-------12-----------| |--------21----------| They'll now work back and forth until they're either side of the middle. This is what you might imagine political parties would do and what they do in some countries. Something is stopping this happening in US politics and I would hazard a guess it's be because of a. primaries (were votes aren't evenly distributed along a 1D spectrum) and b. social cues (people are in politics for more than just winning votes).
- willis936 4y ago
  Political engagement and voter turnout are at an all-time high. Gerrymandering being pushed to its limit and the nature of the senate are making political representation backslide. There's nothing to be gained by oversimplifying.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  It's because this law doesn't apply to politics. The dynamics of our squishy human brains and its reliance on heuristics and in-group/out-group identities result in an inverse Hotellings law where in a political contest with two competitors, they will move farther apart so as to better differentiate the groups and define their boundaries.
- paleotrope 4y ago
  I think you'll find that this is actually the case of US politics once you look beyond the surface. Most Americans differ very little from each other on politics.
sputr 4y ago
The fallacy here is, that “The Democrats” need to “wake up” at all. The establishment is doing GREAT! The point of politics in a democratic system is to get as much power as possible, with as little investment and as little of the accrued power wasted on “the people” while holding it to assure a reelection. They've managed to design a system where most of "the peoples" time, effort, and focus is spent on issues that both have no effect on the rich and powerful, and who's messaging was designed in such a way as to prevent any real movement from a stalemate (while expending massive amounts of energy of "the people" fighting each other). So, the problem isn't with X political class. It's with "the people" who still believe in the fairy tale of democracy. Does not mean that democracy isn't a great system with a great opportunity (i.e. realistic chance for "the people" to increase their quality of life). It just means that to exploit that opportunity, we're going to have to start understanding and playing the system correctly.
h2odragon 4y ago
You be in the tent, pissing out; or outside the tent in the rain. Democrats are having "purity spiral" fights over who gets thrown out of the tent, for a while now. Very little "we can work together on $A despite disagreeing on $B" Republicans are picking up people just because they're the alternative, not because they articulate or exemplify principles.
- mcphage 4y ago
  > Democrats are having "purity spiral" fights over who gets thrown out of the tent, for a while now. Dude, they haven’t even gotten rid of Sinema or Manchin, and those two have done nothing but grind the Democrats plans to a halt. If they can’t even get rid of their right fringe, these purity spirals can’t be very effective.
  - thatguymike 4y ago
    The thing with Sinema and Manchin is that the alternative to them isn't a non-obstructionist Democrat, it's a Republican. "Getting rid" of them would do nothing to help Dems.
    - mcphage 4y ago
      It wouldn't, and that's why they're still there—but if the Democrats were in the middle of a "purity spiral", they'd be gone. Instead they're in the middle of "we've got these people constantly blocking us but they're slightly better than the alternative spiral". In other words, spinning in circles going nowhere.
  - yucky 4y ago
    Republicans have centrists too, that isn't unique to one party. Representatives will generally take on the ideological positions of those they represent, and the fact is West Virginia is nothing like California so we shouldn't expect the representatives to be the same ideologically.
    - 4y ago
BlinkenBlinken 4y ago
A long time ago the republicans where less conservative and more progressive that the democrats. Now both seem to run a contest of who is the most conservative, least progressive and most racist of them all.
- breadbreadbread 4y ago
  gee i wonder why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
bediger4000 4y ago
Democrats
breadbreadbread 4y ago
can someone tell me if this article is going to tell me for the hundredth time that the left is to blame for everything despite having no tangible power? if the answer is yes I won't bother finding a way past the paywall.
- kcplate 4y ago
  > that the left is to blame for everything despite having no tangible power? Control of both houses and the executive branch, but can’t implement their stated agenda because it’s unpalatable to members within their own party. Yeah I’d say they are to blame.
  - breadbreadbread 4y ago
    hey bud the Democratic party is not what i mean by "The Left". Most leftists see the Dems as centrists. center-left at best
taylodl 4y ago
For me it's Game Over for the Republican Party. It was bad enough when they were the party of obstruction. Now they're the party of insurrection. It's not the Democratic Party who needs to wakeup, it's ignorant Americans who don't know Duverger's Law who need to wake up. Duverger's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
- kcplate 4y ago
  You are optimistic. Perhaps it could be if the economy wasn’t mismanaged into the ground the last 18 months. Jan 6 doesnt mean as much to the voting public as the prices at the pump and the grocery stores. TBH the only people I know paying any level of attention to all that Jan 6 stuff are the people who would never vote Republican anyway.

22 points by runeks 4y ago

Pot meet kettle. The right has seen recent success because they have less infighting and are more welcoming of their extremes. The left can't even agree on what they consider progressive.

krapp 4y ago
The ratchet effect is real. Republicans move the country further and further right, even when it takes an attempted coup or risks a Constitutional crisis, and Democrats block counter-movement to the left at every opportunity. It's because we don't have a true left in the apparatus of power in the US, even though the actual population tends towards the left. The Democrats aren't leftists, they're center-right at best, basically Conservatives minus the Evangelical Christian veneer, strongly pro-military, pro-capitalism, pro-status quo. The few actual leftists like AOC and Bernie are allowed to piss and moan about things but never to do anything to risk upsetting the apple cart.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  I'm not convinced it is real, because that's the same story the right has been telling about the left since Bill Clinton. Slippery Slope! Overton Window! Ratchet Effect! I've been hearing those rants for more than 30 years, though that repeated complaint has recently come in to fashion on the left among the young. Repetition makes something seem true, but it does not truth make.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yunruse 4y ago

The problem with politics is that it’s rarely made of binary issues, and yet the voting experience so often is. But the democratic process of the US (and to some extent the UK) is that inevitably two parties will appear, and this sort of forces this broad-church experience, smushing it all into one “left and right” axis [0]. Even if we smush things onto an axis, the Overton window of people’s views [1] can probably be approximated as a bell curve, and so it stands to reason that the Republicans, too, are full of extremes, and also full of moderates. Both parties would benefit from the clarity of being split up, I think; it’s just genuinely unclear how the process could be changed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

willis936 4y ago
The simple solution is voting system reform. The two party system is a symptom of first-past-the-post voting. Switch to plurality voting and suddenly the quality of representation skyrockets. The system isn't designed to maximize equitable representation and is very resistant to change.
- Chris2048 4y ago
  But things that the two-parties agree on (to not implement) will have very little political willpower to implement. And a system that gives more power to parties that are not the two-parties is such a thing.
  - willis936 4y ago
    That's the "resistant to change" part. NH has the highest number of state reps per capita and three plurality bills were shot down this year by an overwhelming majority. From the richest superdelegate to the smallest fry: every politician toes the line right now. https://www.concordmonitor.com/Should-NH-adopt-ranked-choice-voting-44877882 https://www.concordmonitor.com/Should-NH-adopt-ranked-choice...
- yucky 4y ago
  That is often repeated, but not based on facts. Several nations have FPTP voting and more than two parties, including Canada and the UK.
  - moistly 4y ago
    Canada is very rapidly heading towards a two-party system. The Greens barely count as a party, the NDP have joined forces with the Liberals, the Conservative-Reform Alliance Party is desperately trying to subsume the breakaway PPC Party, and the Bloc is specific to one province. Every election boils down to a choice between two parties: Liberal and Conservative. When the Conservatives are too socially regressive (“barbaric cultural practices hotline”, Pierre Poilievre) many NDP voters hold their nose and vote Liberal. If the Conservatices continue down their current path, Canada will inevitably become a strictly two-party country: the NDP will cease to exist as an alternative.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

All the opinions, topics and policies summarized under the term "clownworld" (some call it far right dogwhistle) are already leading to a massive, conservative backlash. Coupled with economic struggle for the dying middle class this is a disaster.

throwaway6734 4y ago
Dying middle class?
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Opinion online seems to oscillate between "the middle class is changing" and "the middle class is dying". I consider the second to be true. Primarily driven by the housing cost crisis with more and more people staying rent slaves til death. Due to the mixed sentiment one could argue forever for both directions.
  - hirundo 4y ago
    There is a third online opinion on that with a significant following: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappearing-into-the-upper-middle-class-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...

flave 4y ago

What's strange about this is that this goes against a preliminary game theory/optimisation analysis of how the system should work. Hotellings Law (https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2692.htm https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2692.htm) means that when there are two competitors on a spectrum, they will move closer and closer to one another to be as competitive as possible. Even passing beyond the other until they are both either side of the center. You have two ice cream trucks on a 1D beach. |-----1-----------2-| Ice cream truck 2 captures all the business on its right, and 1 captures all the business (more) on it's left. Then they split the central. area 50:50. |-----12------------| Now 2 moves all the way to be next to 1, and takes all the central space (including what it used to have on the right. |------21------------| 1 now comes to the side the grab almost all of the right hand side, surrendering the less valuable left. |-------12-----------| |--------21----------| They'll now work back and forth until they're either side of the middle. This is what you might imagine political parties would do and what they do in some countries. Something is stopping this happening in US politics and I would hazard a guess it's be because of a. primaries (were votes aren't evenly distributed along a 1D spectrum) and b. social cues (people are in politics for more than just winning votes).

willis936 4y ago
Political engagement and voter turnout are at an all-time high. Gerrymandering being pushed to its limit and the nature of the senate are making political representation backslide. There's nothing to be gained by oversimplifying.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
It's because this law doesn't apply to politics. The dynamics of our squishy human brains and its reliance on heuristics and in-group/out-group identities result in an inverse Hotellings law where in a political contest with two competitors, they will move farther apart so as to better differentiate the groups and define their boundaries.
paleotrope 4y ago
I think you'll find that this is actually the case of US politics once you look beyond the surface. Most Americans differ very little from each other on politics.

sputr 4y ago

The fallacy here is, that “The Democrats” need to “wake up” at all. The establishment is doing GREAT! The point of politics in a democratic system is to get as much power as possible, with as little investment and as little of the accrued power wasted on “the people” while holding it to assure a reelection. They've managed to design a system where most of "the peoples" time, effort, and focus is spent on issues that both have no effect on the rich and powerful, and who's messaging was designed in such a way as to prevent any real movement from a stalemate (while expending massive amounts of energy of "the people" fighting each other). So, the problem isn't with X political class. It's with "the people" who still believe in the fairy tale of democracy. Does not mean that democracy isn't a great system with a great opportunity (i.e. realistic chance for "the people" to increase their quality of life). It just means that to exploit that opportunity, we're going to have to start understanding and playing the system correctly.

h2odragon 4y ago

You be in the tent, pissing out; or outside the tent in the rain. Democrats are having "purity spiral" fights over who gets thrown out of the tent, for a while now. Very little "we can work together on $A despite disagreeing on $B" Republicans are picking up people just because they're the alternative, not because they articulate or exemplify principles.

mcphage 4y ago
> Democrats are having "purity spiral" fights over who gets thrown out of the tent, for a while now. Dude, they haven’t even gotten rid of Sinema or Manchin, and those two have done nothing but grind the Democrats plans to a halt. If they can’t even get rid of their right fringe, these purity spirals can’t be very effective.
- thatguymike 4y ago
  The thing with Sinema and Manchin is that the alternative to them isn't a non-obstructionist Democrat, it's a Republican. "Getting rid" of them would do nothing to help Dems.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    It wouldn't, and that's why they're still there—but if the Democrats were in the middle of a "purity spiral", they'd be gone. Instead they're in the middle of "we've got these people constantly blocking us but they're slightly better than the alternative spiral". In other words, spinning in circles going nowhere.
- yucky 4y ago
  Republicans have centrists too, that isn't unique to one party. Representatives will generally take on the ideological positions of those they represent, and the fact is West Virginia is nothing like California so we shouldn't expect the representatives to be the same ideologically.
  - 4y ago

BlinkenBlinken 4y ago

A long time ago the republicans where less conservative and more progressive that the democrats. Now both seem to run a contest of who is the most conservative, least progressive and most racist of them all.

breadbreadbread 4y ago
gee i wonder why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

bediger4000 4y ago

Democrats

breadbreadbread 4y ago

can someone tell me if this article is going to tell me for the hundredth time that the left is to blame for everything despite having no tangible power? if the answer is yes I won't bother finding a way past the paywall.

kcplate 4y ago
> that the left is to blame for everything despite having no tangible power? Control of both houses and the executive branch, but can’t implement their stated agenda because it’s unpalatable to members within their own party. Yeah I’d say they are to blame.
- breadbreadbread 4y ago
  hey bud the Democratic party is not what i mean by "The Left". Most leftists see the Dems as centrists. center-left at best

taylodl 4y ago

For me it's Game Over for the Republican Party. It was bad enough when they were the party of obstruction. Now they're the party of insurrection. It's not the Democratic Party who needs to wakeup, it's ignorant Americans who don't know Duverger's Law who need to wake up. Duverger's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

kcplate 4y ago
You are optimistic. Perhaps it could be if the economy wasn’t mismanaged into the ground the last 18 months. Jan 6 doesnt mean as much to the voting public as the prices at the pump and the grocery stores. TBH the only people I know paying any level of attention to all that Jan 6 stuff are the people who would never vote Republican anyway.