I think Ana and many other “former anti-establishment Democrats” spend too much time with the online left, which has an odd disdain for pragmatic politics. I believe they could have push the Democratic Party to the left on fiscal issues but be more moderate socially which is more in line with the country. The Online left can be rather impractical and unhealthy, with a good gems out there.
Give him credit, this is more-or-less the approach of their standard-bearer Bernie Sanders. He's a bit too "people-y" for my tastes but he doesn't go down these purity-spiral blind-alley echo chambers, he actually talks to normal people.
That's true, Bernie never really went woke, but his appeal is based on hating the rich, so people who really like him tend to be people who really like having an enemy to rail against. With inevitable results.
For those who are interested, I created a Substack of my own that focuses on Democratic Party politics. This election and its oddities inspired me to do this.
The problem is that the democratic party regularly gives shout outs and support to these nut jobs. Leftist policies like M4A, price and rent controls, an inefficient wealth tax, the destruction of nuclear power plants, defunding our defense of European allies, cutting ties with Israel, dismantling law enforcement, promoting minorities for race reasons instead of race-neutral reasons etc. are all things Kamala and other prominent democrats have supported or at least acknowledged as if they aren't insane policies.
Ana is clearly not a policy oriented intellectual based on what I read in her "leaving the left" piece, and the democrats are not the same thing as leftists, but I don't think we should pretend that the democrats have done much to separate themselves from the extremists she's been triggered by.
Hungary is anything but lefty and progressive. They’re simply advanced enough economically as we are many times more than they. Not providing healthcare is radical, not the other way around. It’s telling, the cruelty here, taking inspiration from a far right country right down to the way certain populations and the press are handled then stopping shy of any benefits offered to citizens. Diabolical.
Pay for your services like everything else. It’s not a right. Disagreement across the board. Do you understand or even care to understand actuarial science? More companies and increase competition.
Fee-for-service medicine is the chief driver of costs. Plus, the whole thrust of for-profit medicine has been consolidation and the minimizing of competition.
Actuarial science is the application of the quantification of risk management. What does that have to do with increasing competition.
All health insurance is based on actuarial science …all of it…every single bit of coverage. The only piece you have right is the consolidation that outstrips competition. And that is a big problem. The fee for service issue is a non issue. Feel free to enlighten me with REAL data on how that has driven up healthcare costs. Frankly, that’s where the real competition is in healthcare. I understand this because it’s what I do 6 days a week for the last 30 years.
Pay for my services? I just watched my mom die of cancer. Worked all her life and ended up on Medicare with expensive BC/BS supplemental. Waited weeks for appointments and months for surgeries. A very expensive, slow death. At 50 and self employed my insurance is another mortgage payment to a company that’s likely waiting to deny anything I might really need. This isn’t working.
Odd. In my experience, BCBS through the ACA (self-employed) is great. There are very generous subsidies for people with modest incomes. There is a deductible and an out-of-pocket requirement, but what are people expecting? Should everything be free? Orthopedic issues, cancer in the family, and chronic issues are all covered with no problems. Appointment delays have nothing to do with your coverage. That is a provider issue. You have choices unless you live in a small rural town. Billing is straightforward. I also had a parent with cancer on Medicare with BCBS supplemental; the insurance was great. Another relative on Medicaid with stage IV cancer is getting timely and high-quality care. I am skeptical of assertions that insurance companies are preventing needed care or forcing patients with serious health issues to wait for months. Insurance is not going to "deny anything I might really need."
Do you believe those doctors should not be paid for their services? Do you even understand the level of corruption in processing this through insurance and the government? My mom at 84 is not getting the best care I believe she should and I’m in healthcare. Feel free to show another personal example…as they mean nothing. Until you remove the government and provide real insurance nothing will change.
Hmm, I don't think Ana supports reduction in law enforcement, reduction of nuclear power, or race-based affirmative action anymore. That said, I thought about your response and what I've seen from Ana up to this point and wrote my first substack article about this exactly. I now agree with you more that she moved to form specific alliances rather than for policy reasons.
Yes for sure. Ana would also probably still say she supports the left wing partially as well, right?
My comment is directed at why democrats are losing support from moderates who don't support these things.
Ana personally would (probably) say she doesn't support half of this and then blame the bad-bed-fellows reasoning and her personal experience of ostracization for the rest.
Any individual is going to have a mixture of beliefs that don't quite line up with any party line.
Well, sure, I definitely agree with much of your article. My contention is that the democrats invited the leopards in as much as the left did, both sides wanted this political alliance or at least found it expedient - and both got burned by their naive, unpopular policy stances.
It’s endlessly irritating that these folks are often portrayed in media as the “base” of the Democratic Party. They may be living embodiments of cartoonish left-wing stereotypes promulgated by Fox and AM hate radio, but they have NEVER been the base of the party, and can only be described as “last in, first out” at best (as evidenced by both their enthusiastic willingness to throw away winnable races at the expense of their supposed pet causes, as well as their veneration of non-Democrat Bernie Sanders, whose political cult is second in fanaticism and destructiveness only to Trump’s).
Its not a shock that the proprietors of a podcast financed by the late GOP Governor Buddy Roemer would end up being GOP themselves. I've said it since 2016, these folks are future Republicans in the making. These idiots keep proving me right. They aren't Democrats. They aren't team players. They already hate us and no matter what we do, it'll never be enough. They will just move the goalposts every single time and end up voting GOP by the end of the day. Most of these folks generally have GOP supporting parents and more likely than not follow their parents voting positions. In college, they will do the old, "Voting Green/Libertarian schtick" just so they can still be cool with their college friends, but the moment they graduate and go out in the working world, they slowly become GOP.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to note how often leftists are privileged wypipo who love all the most extreme leftist positions because they are never going to be directly affected by them. It's not like the columbia university nazis have any connection to the middle east, so they can mourn nasrallah while the families of his victims cheer.
I don't suppose you could write an article about Cenk's downfall too? The man seems like he's ranting from an island nowadays. With Bernie Sanders and AOC largely in the Biden/Harris camp despite their varying policies, Cenk no longer has any leverage or infrastructure to influence the party the way he seemingly did between 2016-20. So he's embraced this anti-establishment contrarianism to the point that he doesn't realize it leaves him isolated from whatever remains of the movement he wanted to lead.
Whole article is a deflection of the reality that the Dem party was, at best, too scared to oppose their leftist leaders. Didn’t dare say what the author claims they really believed. Or maybe they didn’t really oppose the bile coming from the left. After all, they rallied lockstep behind every single misbegotten policy and said nothing when their SCOTUS nominee couldn’t even say what a woman is. Or, more accurately, wouldn’t say.
Biden was supposed to be the great moderate Democrat candidate. The electable one. If you watched the showdowns between the Senate and House you would have noticed he backed the pure leftist house bill over the compromise 50 Democrats and 10 Republicans Senate bills every single time
This also why the Democrats really didn't want to have a primary last year. Because the center base exists, but the Senate leadership does not, and they would have gotten shown up.
Nick, your whole party stinks. You just need to face it. You guys let the fringe run wild and all of your politicians caught up with the fringe. Maybe you are an ok person. I don’t know. I really have a hard time liking any of you because of what you’re supporting even today, we have a dementia patient for a president because of you people. The Democrat party did that to our country. In any case y’all need to do a lot more more soul-searching than just blaming Anna Casperian or people like her.
1. The Democrat party left our borders wide open and not only did they lose a half 1 million children they let other nations stage their armies in our country without even noticing.
2. The Democrat party Weaponized our government. It is inarguable that the department of Justice and the FBI are completely out of control. What they did to President Trump is the worst thing I’ve ever seen or read, happened to any President of our nation in the history of this country. It is appalling, Completely appalling what is going on in the DOJ and the FBI. I don’t hear any of you doing anything but clapping like circus seals that somebody’s gonna “get Trump”. And that is even more appalling.
3. Kamala and Joe Biden have cratered our economy. Only rich people who don’t shop for themselves think otherwise. Everybody else saying it is a big fat liar.
4. The condescension and derision coming from your side of the house towards everyone else is intolerable.
5. The Democrat party’s racism is puke worthy. Nobody is homophobic or xenophobic. What we are is sick of being treated like second-class citizens in our own fucking country. As long as you have colored skin you’re all right everybody else is a piece of shit…right Democrats? That’s why DEI is breathing its last breath right now.
Yes, I’d say you have a lot of soul-searching to do and the Democrat party is to blame for what’s going on and it’s not Aaron’s fault. So I think your article is a swinging a miss, sorry. (you see, apologizing is something you people need to learn how to do, it would take you a long way.)
So mainstream Dems were never into this radical social agenda of Ana and others? Joe had topless trannies dancing on the White House lawn!! Sam Brinton? Rachel Levine? Kamala campaigning on defund the Police? Those insane policies ARE mainstream Dem policies. They aren’t fringe.
This. Democrats like the OP are in denial, perhaps because their bubble has taught them false truths like, "there's no such thing as cancel culture" and "JK Rowling is a transphobic bigot."
> If Ana had listened to mainstream Democrats on this, she’d likely hear people telling her “yeah that’s stupid. Let’s focus on access to care and housing and other issues transgender individuals face rather than stupid phrases.”
Can you provide quotes from well known mainstream Democrats?
I think many Democrats might have said such things privately, but most would have been too afraid to be cancelled by the progressive wing of the party.
When you say centrists democrats who are you talking about? Even Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to legalize the 10 million illegals who came in under Joe Biden.
A slight correction: "birthing person" and "menstruating person" aren't umbrella terms to include both cisgender and transgender women. There's already an umbrella term for them: "women." "Birthing person" is an umbrella term for cis women and trans MEN. Both are capable of giving birth, but one is a man and the other is a woman.
A woman who takes testosterone is not a man. It’s a woman who takes testosterone who has masculinized her secondary sexual characteristics. The idea that men have babies is utterly idiotic.
I'm not making any argument about whether trans people are the gender they say they are. (It's so obvious that entertaining your bigotry isn't worth it.) I'm only pointing out an error in the explanation of how the wording was used. Cis women and trans men have a uterus; trans women do not.
Bigotry? Anyone who doesn’t agree with your non scientific approach to respite is a bigot? That’s highly problematic. Are women with PCOS men because their hormone imbalance goes to higher testosterone? Exogenous hormones don’t know your sex and can’t change your sex. Calling me a bigot doesn’t make you any smarter, it’s kind of pathetic.
As I read you, your overall assumption is that, among everyday voters, normie Dems and progressive leftists are often close enough ideologically to work together to accomplish shared goals.
If that is your view, I agree. But I don’t agree the divisions are caused by the particular faction you’re specifically annoyed by. As I saw it, it was created by all factions, and also accelerated by some people who may honestly have a paid job to create intense antipathy among people who might be in conflict but who could ultimately work together much better after hashing out various disagreements but keeping their eye on larger goals. The reason was to make some lose ahead of time, and keep them out. But we might all reap benefits if we can figure out a way to prevent those people from successfully shit-stirring. And we might all lose if we allow these antipathies to harden and embrace shutting people out as a method to prevent views we don’t like from ever getting a purchase.
I don’t have a fully worked out analysis of how the factionalizing happened —it was a very complex process—but just in terms of how it all went down. It was participated in by many people across the ideological spectrum—e.g., people became convinced by caricaturess of one another, and reacted to these, and to being so characterized. There are also some threats that people might pose to one another by various actions intended to point fingers one way or another. There’s also an imbalance of power within the Democrats which now includes the more than half of the country that is self-consciously opposed to the right-wing takeover. If this gets too lopsided, the Democratic party might not be particularly amenable to democracy. Ultimately, the country as a whole always pays even for perceived unfairness in the party because the resentment it causes is very harmful for the Democrats.
In the past, this resentment came back to bite us all as bad actors take advantage of it. The inability of people to participate in the democratic party, which is a sane person’s only electoral option will therefore ultimately end up causing the Dems to lose more often. But notice there tends to be less resentment the more the party tries to include a wider set of views, and this increases participation in elections, as in 2020. A lot of discussions happened, and it was imperfect but it did tend to give people more hope that there would be some point of participating, and their participation was important to winning elections, as you point out. Even when we had the hasty shift to Harris, there was much more of a commitment by those who wouldn’t have chosen her to be useful and help her win, and angry narratives got less of a purchase because people saw that it was an unintentional screw-up not some nefarious plan to sideline them. While there was still a major dispute, quite a few people who don’t wholly agree with her politically saw there wasn’t much to be done but try to make it work out.
Ana Kasparian seems to me someone who has a weak commitment to egalitarianism where all are treated equally, and a much stronger commitment to her place in the media ecosystem so I don’t necessarily view everything she says as representative of a regular voter, leftwing or not.
Long story short, past Democratic victories have seemed to resulted from more people’s sense their views can be given a respectful chance in elections because the Democratic party isn’t wholly run for the benefit of one faction. Obama was a grassroots candidate, for example. So perhaps changes in rhetoric and structure by the Democrats are the best way to avoid factionalizing, resentment, and in-fighting. If the scathing contempt for the people you seem to have scathing contempt for lowers to some extent, and various people have more of a shot at being heard, and affecting electoral outcomes, and participation increases as a result, this would probably do way more to avoid the fissures that weaken the party than banishing some voters to the outer darkness. If people perceive there is a level playing field, and a fairer method for resolving disputes, then this will increase political participation on behalf of the Democrats from more individuals.
People are more enthusiastic about democracy if they think they have a role in the outcome. This angers people who don’t want everyone to have a role in the outcome, particularly ‘leftists.’ But if you want to win, it hardly makes sense to cut off a way of road-testing whether ideas are popular by opening up the party to more views, or by pushing a bunch of voters off the boat entirely.
I walked away from the Democrats because they aren’t Progressive enough! It is the Democratic Party that is cuddling up to the Republicans because it’s all about the money and the prestige.
I think Ana and many other “former anti-establishment Democrats” spend too much time with the online left, which has an odd disdain for pragmatic politics. I believe they could have push the Democratic Party to the left on fiscal issues but be more moderate socially which is more in line with the country. The Online left can be rather impractical and unhealthy, with a good gems out there.
Give him credit, this is more-or-less the approach of their standard-bearer Bernie Sanders. He's a bit too "people-y" for my tastes but he doesn't go down these purity-spiral blind-alley echo chambers, he actually talks to normal people.
That's true, Bernie never really went woke, but his appeal is based on hating the rich, so people who really like him tend to be people who really like having an enemy to rail against. With inevitable results.
For those who are interested, I created a Substack of my own that focuses on Democratic Party politics. This election and its oddities inspired me to do this.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thedemocrat?r=1m7qbo&utm_medium=ios
The problem is that the democratic party regularly gives shout outs and support to these nut jobs. Leftist policies like M4A, price and rent controls, an inefficient wealth tax, the destruction of nuclear power plants, defunding our defense of European allies, cutting ties with Israel, dismantling law enforcement, promoting minorities for race reasons instead of race-neutral reasons etc. are all things Kamala and other prominent democrats have supported or at least acknowledged as if they aren't insane policies.
Ana is clearly not a policy oriented intellectual based on what I read in her "leaving the left" piece, and the democrats are not the same thing as leftists, but I don't think we should pretend that the democrats have done much to separate themselves from the extremists she's been triggered by.
I’m not an M4A fan, but the idea of national health insurance is hardly leftist. Not when pretty much every other wealthy nation has some form of it.
Even Hungary, the country these nut jobs want so badly to be bas nationalized care.
Population of Hungry?
It’s a lefty and progressive agenda period. Other countries don’t count and apparently you don’t understand why?
Hungary is anything but lefty and progressive. They’re simply advanced enough economically as we are many times more than they. Not providing healthcare is radical, not the other way around. It’s telling, the cruelty here, taking inspiration from a far right country right down to the way certain populations and the press are handled then stopping shy of any benefits offered to citizens. Diabolical.
Pay for your services like everything else. It’s not a right. Disagreement across the board. Do you understand or even care to understand actuarial science? More companies and increase competition.
Fee-for-service medicine is the chief driver of costs. Plus, the whole thrust of for-profit medicine has been consolidation and the minimizing of competition.
Actuarial science is the application of the quantification of risk management. What does that have to do with increasing competition.
All health insurance is based on actuarial science …all of it…every single bit of coverage. The only piece you have right is the consolidation that outstrips competition. And that is a big problem. The fee for service issue is a non issue. Feel free to enlighten me with REAL data on how that has driven up healthcare costs. Frankly, that’s where the real competition is in healthcare. I understand this because it’s what I do 6 days a week for the last 30 years.
Pay for my services? I just watched my mom die of cancer. Worked all her life and ended up on Medicare with expensive BC/BS supplemental. Waited weeks for appointments and months for surgeries. A very expensive, slow death. At 50 and self employed my insurance is another mortgage payment to a company that’s likely waiting to deny anything I might really need. This isn’t working.
Odd. In my experience, BCBS through the ACA (self-employed) is great. There are very generous subsidies for people with modest incomes. There is a deductible and an out-of-pocket requirement, but what are people expecting? Should everything be free? Orthopedic issues, cancer in the family, and chronic issues are all covered with no problems. Appointment delays have nothing to do with your coverage. That is a provider issue. You have choices unless you live in a small rural town. Billing is straightforward. I also had a parent with cancer on Medicare with BCBS supplemental; the insurance was great. Another relative on Medicaid with stage IV cancer is getting timely and high-quality care. I am skeptical of assertions that insurance companies are preventing needed care or forcing patients with serious health issues to wait for months. Insurance is not going to "deny anything I might really need."
Do you believe those doctors should not be paid for their services? Do you even understand the level of corruption in processing this through insurance and the government? My mom at 84 is not getting the best care I believe she should and I’m in healthcare. Feel free to show another personal example…as they mean nothing. Until you remove the government and provide real insurance nothing will change.
Ana supports all of those things. She still does.
Hmm, I don't think Ana supports reduction in law enforcement, reduction of nuclear power, or race-based affirmative action anymore. That said, I thought about your response and what I've seen from Ana up to this point and wrote my first substack article about this exactly. I now agree with you more that she moved to form specific alliances rather than for policy reasons.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150413349
She still supports the other stuff
Yes for sure. Ana would also probably still say she supports the left wing partially as well, right?
My comment is directed at why democrats are losing support from moderates who don't support these things.
Ana personally would (probably) say she doesn't support half of this and then blame the bad-bed-fellows reasoning and her personal experience of ostracization for the rest.
Any individual is going to have a mixture of beliefs that don't quite line up with any party line.
Right but moderates never supported those things. Ana did, and bullied moderate Dems who didn’t, until she fell victim to those policies.
Well, sure, I definitely agree with much of your article. My contention is that the democrats invited the leopards in as much as the left did, both sides wanted this political alliance or at least found it expedient - and both got burned by their naive, unpopular policy stances.
I had forgotten about rent control. You’re spot on, these are nutty ideas that mainstream Democrats support.
It’s endlessly irritating that these folks are often portrayed in media as the “base” of the Democratic Party. They may be living embodiments of cartoonish left-wing stereotypes promulgated by Fox and AM hate radio, but they have NEVER been the base of the party, and can only be described as “last in, first out” at best (as evidenced by both their enthusiastic willingness to throw away winnable races at the expense of their supposed pet causes, as well as their veneration of non-Democrat Bernie Sanders, whose political cult is second in fanaticism and destructiveness only to Trump’s).
Its not a shock that the proprietors of a podcast financed by the late GOP Governor Buddy Roemer would end up being GOP themselves. I've said it since 2016, these folks are future Republicans in the making. These idiots keep proving me right. They aren't Democrats. They aren't team players. They already hate us and no matter what we do, it'll never be enough. They will just move the goalposts every single time and end up voting GOP by the end of the day. Most of these folks generally have GOP supporting parents and more likely than not follow their parents voting positions. In college, they will do the old, "Voting Green/Libertarian schtick" just so they can still be cool with their college friends, but the moment they graduate and go out in the working world, they slowly become GOP.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to note how often leftists are privileged wypipo who love all the most extreme leftist positions because they are never going to be directly affected by them. It's not like the columbia university nazis have any connection to the middle east, so they can mourn nasrallah while the families of his victims cheer.
I don't suppose you could write an article about Cenk's downfall too? The man seems like he's ranting from an island nowadays. With Bernie Sanders and AOC largely in the Biden/Harris camp despite their varying policies, Cenk no longer has any leverage or infrastructure to influence the party the way he seemingly did between 2016-20. So he's embraced this anti-establishment contrarianism to the point that he doesn't realize it leaves him isolated from whatever remains of the movement he wanted to lead.
Yeah turns out Bernie is only in the Biden/Harris camp when they are winning.
Whole article is a deflection of the reality that the Dem party was, at best, too scared to oppose their leftist leaders. Didn’t dare say what the author claims they really believed. Or maybe they didn’t really oppose the bile coming from the left. After all, they rallied lockstep behind every single misbegotten policy and said nothing when their SCOTUS nominee couldn’t even say what a woman is. Or, more accurately, wouldn’t say.
Biden was supposed to be the great moderate Democrat candidate. The electable one. If you watched the showdowns between the Senate and House you would have noticed he backed the pure leftist house bill over the compromise 50 Democrats and 10 Republicans Senate bills every single time
This also why the Democrats really didn't want to have a primary last year. Because the center base exists, but the Senate leadership does not, and they would have gotten shown up.
The Democratic Party absolutely got in bed with the far left starting in the late teens and any analysis that doesn’t start there will be misleading
Nick, your whole party stinks. You just need to face it. You guys let the fringe run wild and all of your politicians caught up with the fringe. Maybe you are an ok person. I don’t know. I really have a hard time liking any of you because of what you’re supporting even today, we have a dementia patient for a president because of you people. The Democrat party did that to our country. In any case y’all need to do a lot more more soul-searching than just blaming Anna Casperian or people like her.
1. The Democrat party left our borders wide open and not only did they lose a half 1 million children they let other nations stage their armies in our country without even noticing.
2. The Democrat party Weaponized our government. It is inarguable that the department of Justice and the FBI are completely out of control. What they did to President Trump is the worst thing I’ve ever seen or read, happened to any President of our nation in the history of this country. It is appalling, Completely appalling what is going on in the DOJ and the FBI. I don’t hear any of you doing anything but clapping like circus seals that somebody’s gonna “get Trump”. And that is even more appalling.
3. Kamala and Joe Biden have cratered our economy. Only rich people who don’t shop for themselves think otherwise. Everybody else saying it is a big fat liar.
4. The condescension and derision coming from your side of the house towards everyone else is intolerable.
5. The Democrat party’s racism is puke worthy. Nobody is homophobic or xenophobic. What we are is sick of being treated like second-class citizens in our own fucking country. As long as you have colored skin you’re all right everybody else is a piece of shit…right Democrats? That’s why DEI is breathing its last breath right now.
Yes, I’d say you have a lot of soul-searching to do and the Democrat party is to blame for what’s going on and it’s not Aaron’s fault. So I think your article is a swinging a miss, sorry. (you see, apologizing is something you people need to learn how to do, it would take you a long way.)
So mainstream Dems were never into this radical social agenda of Ana and others? Joe had topless trannies dancing on the White House lawn!! Sam Brinton? Rachel Levine? Kamala campaigning on defund the Police? Those insane policies ARE mainstream Dem policies. They aren’t fringe.
This. Democrats like the OP are in denial, perhaps because their bubble has taught them false truths like, "there's no such thing as cancel culture" and "JK Rowling is a transphobic bigot."
I'm not sure I blame Ana. Maybe Democrats should take a stronger stand against the leftists.
Ana is one of the reasons they haven't
Agreed. A lot of this is “No True Scotsman” stuff.
> If Ana had listened to mainstream Democrats on this, she’d likely hear people telling her “yeah that’s stupid. Let’s focus on access to care and housing and other issues transgender individuals face rather than stupid phrases.”
Can you provide quotes from well known mainstream Democrats?
I think many Democrats might have said such things privately, but most would have been too afraid to be cancelled by the progressive wing of the party.
They would’ve been too afraid to get cancelled by Ana herself
Instead they got cancelled by the rest of the country. One can only hope the Democrats have learned their lesson.
Coincidentally, Noah Smith wrote a post arguing mainstream Democrats need to loudly denounce nutty progressive activists, not only ignore them.
If Kamala had her “Sister Souljah moment” during the campaign, things might have been different.
When you say centrists democrats who are you talking about? Even Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to legalize the 10 million illegals who came in under Joe Biden.
A slight correction: "birthing person" and "menstruating person" aren't umbrella terms to include both cisgender and transgender women. There's already an umbrella term for them: "women." "Birthing person" is an umbrella term for cis women and trans MEN. Both are capable of giving birth, but one is a man and the other is a woman.
A woman who takes testosterone is not a man. It’s a woman who takes testosterone who has masculinized her secondary sexual characteristics. The idea that men have babies is utterly idiotic.
I'm not making any argument about whether trans people are the gender they say they are. (It's so obvious that entertaining your bigotry isn't worth it.) I'm only pointing out an error in the explanation of how the wording was used. Cis women and trans men have a uterus; trans women do not.
Bigotry? Anyone who doesn’t agree with your non scientific approach to respite is a bigot? That’s highly problematic. Are women with PCOS men because their hormone imbalance goes to higher testosterone? Exogenous hormones don’t know your sex and can’t change your sex. Calling me a bigot doesn’t make you any smarter, it’s kind of pathetic.
As I read you, your overall assumption is that, among everyday voters, normie Dems and progressive leftists are often close enough ideologically to work together to accomplish shared goals.
If that is your view, I agree. But I don’t agree the divisions are caused by the particular faction you’re specifically annoyed by. As I saw it, it was created by all factions, and also accelerated by some people who may honestly have a paid job to create intense antipathy among people who might be in conflict but who could ultimately work together much better after hashing out various disagreements but keeping their eye on larger goals. The reason was to make some lose ahead of time, and keep them out. But we might all reap benefits if we can figure out a way to prevent those people from successfully shit-stirring. And we might all lose if we allow these antipathies to harden and embrace shutting people out as a method to prevent views we don’t like from ever getting a purchase.
I don’t have a fully worked out analysis of how the factionalizing happened —it was a very complex process—but just in terms of how it all went down. It was participated in by many people across the ideological spectrum—e.g., people became convinced by caricaturess of one another, and reacted to these, and to being so characterized. There are also some threats that people might pose to one another by various actions intended to point fingers one way or another. There’s also an imbalance of power within the Democrats which now includes the more than half of the country that is self-consciously opposed to the right-wing takeover. If this gets too lopsided, the Democratic party might not be particularly amenable to democracy. Ultimately, the country as a whole always pays even for perceived unfairness in the party because the resentment it causes is very harmful for the Democrats.
In the past, this resentment came back to bite us all as bad actors take advantage of it. The inability of people to participate in the democratic party, which is a sane person’s only electoral option will therefore ultimately end up causing the Dems to lose more often. But notice there tends to be less resentment the more the party tries to include a wider set of views, and this increases participation in elections, as in 2020. A lot of discussions happened, and it was imperfect but it did tend to give people more hope that there would be some point of participating, and their participation was important to winning elections, as you point out. Even when we had the hasty shift to Harris, there was much more of a commitment by those who wouldn’t have chosen her to be useful and help her win, and angry narratives got less of a purchase because people saw that it was an unintentional screw-up not some nefarious plan to sideline them. While there was still a major dispute, quite a few people who don’t wholly agree with her politically saw there wasn’t much to be done but try to make it work out.
Ana Kasparian seems to me someone who has a weak commitment to egalitarianism where all are treated equally, and a much stronger commitment to her place in the media ecosystem so I don’t necessarily view everything she says as representative of a regular voter, leftwing or not.
Long story short, past Democratic victories have seemed to resulted from more people’s sense their views can be given a respectful chance in elections because the Democratic party isn’t wholly run for the benefit of one faction. Obama was a grassroots candidate, for example. So perhaps changes in rhetoric and structure by the Democrats are the best way to avoid factionalizing, resentment, and in-fighting. If the scathing contempt for the people you seem to have scathing contempt for lowers to some extent, and various people have more of a shot at being heard, and affecting electoral outcomes, and participation increases as a result, this would probably do way more to avoid the fissures that weaken the party than banishing some voters to the outer darkness. If people perceive there is a level playing field, and a fairer method for resolving disputes, then this will increase political participation on behalf of the Democrats from more individuals.
People are more enthusiastic about democracy if they think they have a role in the outcome. This angers people who don’t want everyone to have a role in the outcome, particularly ‘leftists.’ But if you want to win, it hardly makes sense to cut off a way of road-testing whether ideas are popular by opening up the party to more views, or by pushing a bunch of voters off the boat entirely.
You just know that all the too-online dickheads giving Ana grief for speaking up about being sexually assaulted were *men,* don't you?
I walked away from the Democrats because they aren’t Progressive enough! It is the Democratic Party that is cuddling up to the Republicans because it’s all about the money and the prestige.