This is the New York Times fanning the flames to divide the left. [EDIT for clarity: Divide the left means divide the vote means Republicans in power]
I’m sure they interviewed actual people with real opinions like this, but these are the opinions they are choosing to highlight and thus shape the narrative.
Okay, I see your flag and all of that, but I’m gonna take this in good faith.
The New York Times and other media have an opportunity to cast the Democratic Socialist Party as the cool kids, and even if that doesn’t align with the corporate Neolib agenda, it does allow them to make coalitions and leaves them to co-opt the DSP in the future.
TLDR, it is in the establishment Democratic Party’s interest to encourage and support the DSP. The New York Times in mainstream media is refusing to frame the politics that way.
The problem with the DSA isn’t that they don’t align with the corporate neolib agenda. It’s that the DSA seeks to abolish the institutions that liberalism relies on for its power. It is not in the interest of the Democrats to support the DSA except in so far as it allows them to sheepdog proto-revolutionary energy into dead ends. That’s how they use Bernie and in the last decade or so it’s how they used the DSA.
Until people understand what liberalism is, this confusion will continue. Liberalism is what made Thomas Jefferson want to split from the crown. It’s also the philosophy that allowed him to argue against importing slaves from Africa to increase the price of the slaves he sold from his “breeding plantations”, or rape farms as they might be more rightly called.
Every conservative in the US today, with a couple rare exceptions, is a Liberal, and every Democrat in the US today is also a Liberal. They differ on how far liberal values should extend, but they rely on the same power system: private property, profit, corporate personhood, common stock, police, genocide, and ecocide.
The DSA will only be a part of the Democrats insofar as they are a) ineffective or b) abandon their anti-capitalist pole. Outside of that, the NYT is doing the same job it always has done - protect the ruling class from the masses.
You are distracted by the term “the left.”
This article and and others that support this narrative, serve only to divide the Democratic vote.
Divide the democratic vote along any boundary and Republicans remain in power.
If you think Neolibs are just as bad as Nazis, then I can’t help you.
Do I think the Good Cop in the Good Cop / Bad Cop routine is just as bad as the Bad Cop? That’s not the question. The question is why, after all this time, and everything you know, do you still think that cooperating with the Good Cop is in your interest. It’s not.
The Democratic Party and The Republican Party are two fronts for the fascist elite of the Eurocentric empire, they have a single shared purpose. They collaborate on that purpose and take up oppositional positions in the public sphere to maintain and divide the loyalty of the masses.
Democrats winning has done absolutely nothing to stop the march of fascism. In fact, Democrats actively participate in the never ending fascism that birthed and sustained the USA for its entire existence. Don’t forget, not only did FDR put anyone vaguely asian-looking into concentration camps, the government stole their private property as well, while they were also building the racist redlining program into the banking industry.
The Democrats can’t save you because they have no intention of saving you. They are active collaborators in the whole fascist system, and part of their role is to get you a coffee and apologize for the bad behavior of their partners. But they’re not doing that because they intend to fix it. They do it because it gets you to support them and ignore the alternative.
You’re using words as if English were an immutable language, which it isn’t.
Yes, FDR was president of a very racist country and Jefferson owned slaves. But neither one pointed to a minority, thought “I can scapegoat them”, and then used violence and terror to break the political system and commit genocide.
No one can stop you from using 'facism" as a label for what I might call eurocentric globalism, but if you do so please do not expect anyone to react as if you were talking about genocidal bigotry.
Especially when we have actual genocidal bigots more than happy for you to dilute their second-most infamous label.
ok
thanks for sharing your carefully considered opinions
It’s only in their interest if you assume their interest is in governance. If that is not their interest, if they are actually interested in maintaining the status quo so they can keep insider trading from congress, then it makes sense for them to fight against the rising tide of progress.
do you think the commies are self-sabotaging from fear they might actually be in a position of responsibility and have to deliver some of their nonsense if they unite with the moderate left?
what’s this gotta do with obama lol
These people declared war on Obama back in the day.
I love how people think the Democrats are exactly like the Republicans.
Republicans bent the knee to trump x1000
Obama faced stiff push back and was considered a progressive almost TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO. Obama is not the kingpin, he did not restructure the Dems or really change the overall party goals, he set expectations for more progressive administrations ahead of him and is part of the reason why establishment Dems can’t seem to get a bite.
Say what you want, judge as you please but he opened up paths for other more progressive candidates than himself and if you’re too stupid to analyze his term clearly, you probably voted for Trump at least once.
But he ended up actually not being a progressive.
What he did was show that “hope and change” (progressivism) was popular enough to win an election, which admittedly did pave the way for future progressive candidates. Even if he was just pulling the rug out from under his supporters.
He passed the biggest healthcare reform bill in decades in the checks notes few months he had full control of the legislature. Changes to it were hamstrung after Ted Kennedy died.
Did he prematurely triangulate in the hopes of getting Republican votes under the assumption that they were operating in good faith? Absolutely. But I think that was naivete, not a policy statement.
you probably voted for Trump at least once.
or at the least, not against at least once.
Obama wing? I’d be much more okay trying to call it the Hillary wing or Biden wing. But even that is stupid. It’s the corporate/oligarch-funded Democrats vs. the Democratic Socialists.
If you want to try and make your point, trying to tie Obama to the part of the party you’re wanting to attack will not help your case.
Also, where did ‘ascending democrats’ come from?
A class war subtext from NY Times…
Conservative Democrats.
Stop calling them moderates.
Its new york times, ofcourse they paint them as moderates.
As long as people know not to repeat it.
Moderate Democrats can fuck all the way off and continue shitting the bed with their electoral results. They are losing relevance; they just won’t admit it.
No democrat supporting israel can be called moderate
Gah, but they’re the experts on electability!!!
I mean… if candidates do the opposite of what the establishment and their consultants recommend, then yeah.
Unfortunately I think there will be a blue wave in the midterms and corpo Dems will learn absolutely nothing.
That’s precisely what will happen, and then they’ll run a ticket with something like Newsom/Carlson and be shocked when people don’t get excited for a return to the status quo
Honestly I’m not sure if they’re doing any better against us than they are against the people they’re supposed to be fighting. Worse, IMO
Because the working class have always held the real power, being the real reason work gets done, and as a result have always been the real enemy of the people in power and the real threat to their power. Some of them are just better at pretending, because they want to play “Good cop, bad cop” against us, and that strategy has been working really well for them lately.
I think we are seeing the NYT showing it’s corporate left bias. Who does a fight between forces in the left benefit? Center left media. Didn’t believe the hype. This is all just AIPAC reacting to losing the elections they are used to successfully rigging.
Just what we fucking need, a split party when we need to focus on ousting the fascists.
It’s exactly how we ended up with fascists to begin with
The party is split precisely about whether we really need to be fighting the fascists or not.
You can’t come together ignoring differences to accomplish a shared goal when the goal is not actually shared.
The progressive are the moderates , the centrist are the extremists since they support the terrorist genocidal state of israel
$15 million? Hasn’t APAIC spent many times that much money in trying to fight progressives this year already?
The “moderates” love of money will cause them to lose even more money when a revolution starts and heads start rolling with it.
“Voters are telling us what they want. We must crush their efforts.”
The Obama Wing
Lol lmao even. OP is unhinged
Rahm Emanuel was Obama’s chief of staff. Hillary Clinton was his Secretary of State. His Vice President was Biden himself. His Secretary or the Treasury’s resume is classic neoliberal.
Like, I can’t even fathom how you would call this unhinged. Obama was firmly in the centrist/neoliberal wing of the party. He ran on hope and change, but he filled his cabinet with Clinton alums and Wall Street bankers. He ran under the banner of a progressive, but he governed under the same centrist banner as Clinton and Biden.
Did you forget how he wasted months of precious Congressional time by desperately trying to make the PPACA bipartisan? He let Republicans slow things down for months. He let them put all sorts of amendments into it. In the end, they all voted against it.
If Obama was famous for anything, it was surrendering in advance. This was a massive topic of discussion at the time. Obama was infamous for performative bipartisanship. He wouldn’t propose a democratic version of a bill. He would start by magnanimously offering a compromise between the Republican and Democratic positions, hoping in vain to bring Republicans onboard. Republicans took his compromise-in-advance as weakness and never returned the favor.
Have you really forgotten history that quickly? Obama was a neoliberal to his core. It was his cabinet that negotiated the bailouts of the banks. Progressives at the time were arguing that any bailouts should be made contingent on keeping people in their homes, perhaps writing down the balances of underwater mortgages. Instead, the centrists in the Obama administration bailed out the banks and left working families to lose their homes.
Obama was firmly part of the neoliberal wing of the party, the same faction that’s been ascendant since Clinton. So yes, it is literally the Obama wing of the party that progressives need to fight against. Remember, Obama wore the skin of a progressive, but he actually governed as a centrist.
And you’re not even getting into his foriegn policy or his continuation of the, “War on Terror.” Establishing the drone program as an unaccountable assassination tool of the Executive Branch? Collecting Americans metadata from tech companies without a warrent? Prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act? You could credibly argue that he was further right than Bush on national security. Every time Trump subpoenas a journalist for their sources I think,.“Damn, I wish Obama hadn’t normalized this shit.”
Don’t forget about keeping open the extrajudicial indefinite detention and torture prison.
Obama was such a fucking disappointment. After 8 years of Bush it looked like we were getting change and then he just kept things the same. He probably contributed more to my movement leftward than Bernie did.
Good point, he promised to close it when he was campaigning, but he just couldn’t do it for some reason once he was in office.
Obama won overwhelmingly by campaigning as a progressive, then governed as a centrist, and 8 years later, voters abandoned the party. Somehow, the establishment’s takeaway from that was, “we need to be less progressive.”
“Democrat president worked with the most famous democrats”
What’s unhinged is people downvoting and throwing insults at people who say drone strike civilians Obama was a centrist neo-liberal.
Stop worshipping politicians. Obama was not nearly as bad as any replication in living memory, but he is not a progressive or a leftist, he’s a neo liberal capitalist who serves the same class interests.
On the ACA he didn’t have the votes because Republicans were suing to keep Al Fraken from taking office, and by the time that bullshit ended Ted Kennedy had stopped showing up for work, but managed to cling to life for months, then the Tea Party filled Kennedy’s seat, so the only time he had the 60 votes needed in the Senate was the few week’s Kennedy’s temporary appointment was seated, and that time included Christmas and New Year’s.
Did you forget how he wasted months of precious Congressional time by desperately trying to make the PPACA bipartisan? He let Republicans slow things down for months. He let them put all sorts of amendments into it. In the end, they all voted against it.
It’s important to put this into historical context… the world was different in 2008 - we still had McCain defending Obama against his most insane, racist supporters during the election. You could absolutely be forgiven at that time for taking most politicians at good faith that they had SOME kind of scruples or would do the right thing if push came to shove, and we know how absolutely naively batshit and wrong that was now, but it’s easy to say that now with the benefit of another 18 years of data.
By your logic of association, Trump must be very religious.
Obama is establishment, so I dont see why you would think of this as unhinged.
He isn’t in power though. This is just click bait
He had enough power to clear the Democratic field for Biden in 2020.
More than 6 years ago…
We’re still living in the fallout of 2016. The Dem establishment’s coordinated push against progressives (and the Clinton team’s strategy of trying to prop up Trump) greatly contributed to the rise of Trump. And that dynamic of an ascendant fascist right being bolstered by centrists more interested in keeping leftists out of office than fighting the fascists, has defined American politics for the last decade. You could even argue it started earlier than that with Obama’s failure to deal with the fallout of the recession, but honestly we could just keep going back in time if we wanted. I think the most relevant turning point for the current paradigm is 2016.
From there look at how they have treated or reacted to progressive candidates not even going to congress but local positions since 2016. They have not offered much in the way of support when they become the nominee and at times let a spoiler candidate run to stop them from winning. Some people may not believe it yet, but complicity is in the Democrat’s blood. The entire “tent pole party” is the same lip service as they give the “melting pot” metaphor now. That they’d rather a Republican at this time win over a progressive Democrat.
Has another Democrat become nearly as relevant in that time? Was Haley Stevens pretending that Obama endorsed her just last month? Are you really saying thst the Democrats don’t desperately cling to Obama’s popularity, or that that doesn’t give him sway within the party?
