128 Comments

Left policies don’t work. The idea Left economics must separate from Woke isn’t unreasonable. The problem is once you implement left policies the economy craters. EVERY SINGLE TIME. At what point will you well meaning and earnest lefties wake up to the fact that Venezuela and Cuba, Soviet Russia, the Eastern bloc, and China pre capitalism were disasters. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Let me give you an example. The left’s latest take on total economic destruction- taxing unrealized capital gains. I am guessing the bulk of people here think it is an awesome idea. Amirite?

So, a guy has an idea. He raises money, and takes a company public. The company is in startup phase. It isn’t making ANY money yet. But the market likes it. It has sizzle. It gets an evaluation quickly of $2B. The original founder has shares worth, on the surface, $500M. Oopsy! Elizabeth Warren’s plan means he has to pay $125M in taxes that year. Plus, all the other original investors have to pay their share too. How much? $500M in taxes will be collected. But the company has no cash. All its cash is going to development of the product. What happens? The founder and all the original investors owe $500M in taxes. They have to sell their shares! Every share is dumped simultaneously. Market value is demolished overnight.

Now multiply that by every small cap company in the US. The stock market tanks. Probably drops to about 20%. Amazon, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, all crater. Every pension fund is bankrupted overnight.

So, you are young and ambitious. You have an idea. If you start it in the US and if it takes off you are bankrupted and lose control of your idea. Within five years.

WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD DO THIS? No one!! You take your idea and do it in Canada or Mexico or Europe.

The left constantly tries to extract more money from those who do, to give to those who don’t do. It always backfires.

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I've heard your argument from many individuals over the years. The comparisons you chose are not the correct examples. I'm thinking Denmark, Sweden, maybe France. Certainly not tyrannies like Russia or China. They call themselves "left." But they're mass murderers. Taxing unrealized cap gains is a non-starter and was never seriously considered by anyone. We should talk to each other. Not past each other or over each other. And without the expectation of changing anyone's mind. Simply an honest exchange of ideas.

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Swedes would deny they are Socialist. They have a large social safety net, which is being retracted. But they are more economically free than Canada. Socialism is when the government directly owns the levers of production. What most people want is Fascism. When private huge corporations control or at least work in concert with government. And small business is entirely under the thumb if government. Arguably we are closer to the latter here.

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Woke. Woke. Woke. Whatever dude. Looking back on history, Reagan was wrong and the hippies were right. Dubya was wrong also. I think if you want to feel useful, go to Iraq and look for WMD’s.

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Reagan was right. Reagan did an amazing job. The hippies, and I was one, were wrong. I know a woman married to a very high ranking Iraqi, a cousin of Saddam and from Tikrit. He was in Saddam’s inner circle. She told me all about the WMD and where they were. But Bush is a globalist, in the same club as all of them. I am useful. I don’t need to try to feel so. And WOKE is wrong wrong wrong.

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You are hopelessly wrong.

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You’ll come around.

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Noting sadder than an old hippie that turned MAGA.

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My friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin said Saddam had WMDs!! Bush/Cheney 2004!! They love Jesus!!!

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This was the wife of a very high ranking Iraqi government official. She told me horror stories about Saddam’s Iraq. And the Gulf War.

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And how is that some 20 year old from Youngstown, OH’s problem?? I supported the no-fly zone that contained Saddam but we have no obligation to improve the lives of Iraqis.

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I wasn’t advocating for anything. No 20 year old from Iowa or Ohio should ruin his life over Halliburton getting a giant rebuild contract.

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You’ll be disappointed

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What did it for me is when progressives defended Daniel Ortega as he committed a blood bath in Nicaragua and accused those being murdered of being CIA operatives.

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No one cares

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The progressive movement lost its way the day those 2 black girls shouted down Bernie at his rally and babbled woke nonsense while Bernie politely nodded agreement. It later came out that they were paid agitators.

The infectious disease outbreaks are almost exclusively linked to new immigrant populations.

The progressive mayors and DAs have been voted out due to their disastrous policies.

Generally, the progressive movement died when it dropped economic populism for woke craziness. You can’t call people bigots because when they say men can’t get pregnant and not expect pushback.

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Please stop posting crap

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Please don’t comment on the internet if you have nothing worthwhile to say.

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You are a Libtard

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You are a bot

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"The infectious disease outbreaks are almost exclusively linked to new immigrant populations."

That is laughable nonsense, if you mean COVID.

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I don’t mean Covid, I mean the diseases being referenced in the article we are commenting on.

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Your a Libtard and even you don’t know what you are saying

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After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.

To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.

Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.

They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.

They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.

Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.

The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.

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That is not the Bernie Sanders/Warren/AOC left, which is all about specific policies revolving around economic justice, supporting workers' rights, universal healthcare, a sustainable environment & climate action, reducing the destabilizing disparity in wealth & power between the rich & the rest of us, having the rich pay their fair share of taxes, affordable housing, etc. They are not focused on the issues or complaints you cited. That is another faction, that has been associated with the left, but I'm not really sure they are, since they seem to be focused on PC issues, rather than the economic & environmental issues that Bernie & most progressives care about, & which are highly popular with the American people in general. Political correctness tends to distract from the concrete issues that concern true progressives, which have been unfairly & incorrectly associated with those more abstract issues you mention.

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Jaime: I tend to agree with you but I am not sure those politicians you mentioned are, in fact, very popular with the actual working class voters who swung our latest election to the Trump Republicans. They are tainted by the policies I mentioned.

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It's because they've been the object of corporatist & right-wing attacks & propaganda that have falsely attributed unpopular ideas to them, when the actual policies they espouse are very popular with the American people.

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Bernie’s personality cult is nearly as obnoxious—and nearly as authoritarian—as Trump’s. (I actually lost friends to the Tara Reade debacle, for which they predictably fell, hook line and sinker.) It’s tough to watch them disappear down one unpopular, Democrat-damaging, democracy-damaging policy rabbit hole after another (masks forever, defund the police, Hamas is good ackchyually), and then wonder why their credibility is absolutely shot to bits. Must be the DNC! 🙄

Unlike a lot of pundits, I’m not terribly worried about this vocal-but-small contingent loudly withholding its votes from Biden. They were never exactly his fans in the first place, and there is no reasoning with the “burn it all down” mindset (reasonable people rarely have that mindset in the first place, as there’s NEVER a guarantee that something better will rise from the ashes). I believe that the persistently-high number of GOP primary voters who cast ballots against Trump are, for the most part, a much more gettable lot.

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There have been 'outbreaks' of disease for which the US population has been vaccinated *every year* since the advent of mass 'vaccinations. That's because 'vaccination' isn't perfect. Also, most outbreaks of diseases for which the US population has been mass 'vaccinated' are due to immigrants bringing diseases from outside the US. If you want to control diseases in the US population, immigrants (especially homosexual immigrants) are the vector to target, not vaccine skeptics.

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whaaaa? Influenza, the main thing we've been vaccinated for *every year*, isn't caused by immigrants and gay men. Neither was COVID. Bird flu isn't coming from them either. Are you still fighting AIDS battles?

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Viral 'vaccines' are a scam. They have nothing to do with real public health and everything to do with profits. As for whether homosexuals and immigrants are specific vectors for viral disease, the answer is 'They are'. This should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the actual behavior of homosexuals. As for 'fighting AIDS battles', as long as there are still homosexuals sucking money from the public teat for 'AIDS' and 'HIV', then those battles are not over.

Homosexuals and immigrants are specific disease vectors whose interdiction would reduce the introduction of disease into the population.

If it saves just one child...

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Hey, i liked your piece! I think it popped up in my feed because my colleague David Perlmutter liked it.

It’s nice to see calmly explained analysis where your political preferences, whatever they may be (centrist, maybe? But i find that term a little reductive), don’t keep you from being reasonable and perceptive.

At any rate— I’m looking forward to reading more.

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I walked away from the so-called "progressives in 2010 when they failed to support the Democratic majority in a fit of either stupidity (because they didn't know the significance in midterms) or pique because the ACA wasn't M4All. They portrayed Obama as a sell out while they sold him out. OWS was a raging failure because they refused to accept the necessity of lesdership. And yes, it opened the gate for the useless Bernie Sanders because they still didn't know what leadership looks like.

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M4A makes more sense at the state level anyway. In states like Vermont and Massachusetts they currently have all of the money necessary to fund a M4A program being spent on health care in their states. So no new taxes are necessary and both state have an agency that runs a major health care system.

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Your ideas are conflated and total BS. As a Center Left person I was more pissed off about Hillary and the DNC screwing Sanders in 2016 when he alone could have beaten Trump because other than Trump - he was the only populist speaking to the majority of fed up citizens barely making ends meet in a post neo-liberal Reagan/Clinton/Republican corporate world. As for 2020 we who are smart knew you can't put lightening in a bottle twice-especially with an honest high integrity Democratic Socialist like Sanders and a fickle electorate. The greedy sick rich 1% will never allow such a person to become the president at least until we the people take our country back as in we are the 99%! I was part of Occupy Wall Street and you obviously know nothing about what the variety of humans from all age groups and backgrounds were fighting for. Saying COVID was a dream come true for leftists is one of the dumbest things I have ever read and I am older and very well read for many decades. Anyone who is older has seen this TV show before - the US is a big yin/yang pendulum that swings back and forth between the right and left forces. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. But I fear the far right far more than the far left. This cycle is on repeat - watch how the billionaire republican cult of Trump drive our nation into the ditch as Republicans always do eventually - and then the Democrats and we the tax payers will have to dig us out as they always have and resuscitate the nation as in 50+ million jobs created since since 1989 vs only a measly million by the so called pro business Republicans! What a joke! But this time it feels different - the desperation of struggling ignorant voters lead to a stupid Trump vote or none at all - that may be the final death blow to Democracy. I pray not but it was already dying on the branch since the hegemony Citizens United SCOTUS decision. Democrats need to regroup and get back to basic life issues that affect most versus only a few - like stopping Global Warming, better wages for the majority of middle class and universal health care would be a good start - all the issues Sanders has consistently fought for his entire 50 years in public service and that the majority of American people want from both parties. Dems blew it but there are a few progressive stars on the horizon - like Gov Newsom from Cali and AOC from NYC who could be the first woman president. Again - only if Democracy is still around in 4 years. Time will tell if all the hundreds of thousands deaths and sacrifice of the men and women who died or were injured in wars for freedom, Democracy and the Constitution for over 250 years were in vain.

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This whole article seemed to betray a confusion about who counts as left, progressive and mainstream. It also shows that the author doesn’t have a grasp on where the factions overlap and where they don’t.

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Do we really need a 'one true Scotsman' argument?

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I said they overlap, not that there’s a true “left”. But the Bernie left and woke left aren’t one in the same, which is the basis of the author’s argument

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“Mike Bloomberg, the architect of a racist Stop and Frisk policing policy”

Racist, lol!

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"Racist"Stop and Frisk policy = The Most Effective, Constitutional, Crime Prevention, Gun Control, and Support for the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection of the Law policy. The Progs must hate the vulnerable and innocent poor who live in gang-infested ghettos in every major city in the U.S.

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And I bet they love stop and frisk, too. Oh, wait, no, they didn't/don't. Maybe they want effective law enforcement that doesn't depend on stop and frisk? Is that even possible to you? Try to reply without crazy-looking random capitalization, please.

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The tuition of Bernie’s supporters behind the scenes at the Iowa caucuses was truly dreadful. They taught the locals how to silence everyone else’s supporters with cursing, yelling in unison, and every sort of dirty trick imaginable. In other words, his senior people acted like the same kind of Marxist street punk he was himself back in the 1960s. They convinced me that his entourage would, if he were elected, act like a leftist paramilitary to carry out Bernie’s “revolution”. He should not have even been allowed into the Democratic presidential election process. He is a Marxist and should be treated with the same disgust as AOC, Ro Khanna and all the other Marxists in Congress.

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Instead, you got a MAGA cadre. Happy now?

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I doubt Americans will ever accept fully left-of-center government. Most of the times when they had the opportunity to have it, it was spurned.

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What is fully left of center government? That's a pretty vague descriptor. What Joe Biden has done is as fully left of as anything since LBJ. He won once. He must win again.

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HE. DIDN'T

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When are so-called progressives going to figure out that imposing conformity from the top down does not advance, well, anything?

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People don’t vote for something which tells them what to do instead of telling them what they get. Trump couldn’t figure out Covid, and Biden promised an end.

Dem’s couldn’t figure out trans, told people to put up with it, Trump promised an end. Dems couldn’t figure out severe inflation effects, told people to put up with it, Trump promised prosperity.

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Yeah and Biden got 12 million votes that neither Obama nor Kamala got. Trump got basically the same number of votes all 3 times. 🤔

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Interesting article, but any take on the left in 2020 that doesn’t tackle the BLM riots is missing a big piece of the puzzle.

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What? Bernie folks to blame for Trump a second time?! Not the party who ran a wine and xanax retard?!

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