Oh no, I’m not brave enough for politics
Right.
You said it! Shifting right, right?!
The thing though is that you NEED a centrist government. Just as a pure right wing government ignores the wishes of many, a pure leftwing government will so too.
I’m not even saying it should be 50/50, you just need actual honest representation.
That ain’t ever going to happen though with the current first past the post and winner takes all system. You need a representative democracy
Depends how you define the left. Really, representative democracy is a leftist idea compared to most historical governments.
Ignoring people’s wishes is OK when those wishes are to hurt other people.
One key point in politics is you never have only two possible views. The simplistic notion of left versus right doesn’t make sense at all because people have a wide variety of priorities and problems and needs. It’s convenient to use those terms, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that they could ever define what’s actually happening.
Anyway, specifically in the US in the last few decades, what people call the centrists are actually pro-corporate politicians. They will vote for whatever makes money for big companies. And we don’t need people representing big companies.
Depends on what you mean by “centrist”. If you mean what the US calls centrist, then hell the fuck no. Actual centrism is considered “radical left” around here. If you mean “centrist” by the rest of the world standards, then we can talk.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree there. Right-wing politics are fundamentally hierarchical and anti-democratic. Going for Centrism there is saying that wolves should have a say in decisions related to fencing and whether barns should have doors.
No. You honestly don’t.
The Democrats in the US fall to the right of conservative parties in other countries, and we seem to be the only modern country that can’t get it’s shit together.
My bad I thought he was a Democrat. I thought obama had a slim majority in the senate in the first half of his first term? I’ll have to double check
assuming therell be a next time
Dems are controlled opposition
Lol. Lmao even.
They need to keep garnering that valuable Cheyney endorsement
Bold to assume there will be another cycle.
By “centrist” you mean “someone between the moderate right Dems and the extreme right Reps”?
Harris’s Hope: Getting Right-Leaning Voters to Shift to the Left
“Democrats see a narrow opening to peel away center-right voters bothered by abortion bans and by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”
“Ms. Harris and her allies have made persuasion of moderate and even right-leaning voters a central aspect of their closing strategy”
Good question. That’s the problem with labeling shit by a term that gets hard to nail down instead of expressing the intent behind your usage of the word. My definition of a centrist (the unwarpped version) is someone in the middle of left and right, but everyone on the Internet hears in the middle of Dems and GOP, which puts them quite to the right.
The more we use labels that are constantly evolving the less we can communicate effectively
Yup. It’s one of the least representative and most corrupt so-called modern democracies in the world.
Political views are a bell curve
The left doesn’t show up to vote
Look I voted because I’m a big picture guy and I see where you are coming from but the Democrats made it very clear they didn’t give a fuck about the left vote this time around.
Maybe this time they will learn that if people want a conservative they will just vote for the psycho-conservative party that actually delivers than the milquetoast-conservative party that crows about “unity” and “woke” shit all the time.
Haha who am I kidding
You sure showed them, didn’t you?
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Deleting a meme for misinformation is the funniest meme of all lol.
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Remains to be seen 4 years from now.
Hopefully we’ll still have elections then.
There aren’t enough leftists in America to win an election without catering to multiple ideologies.
Democrats were catering to leftists and moderates and never-trumpers. Because there is a lot of diversity in our country and it is a politicians job to work for all their constituents not just a certain ideology.
Leftists have a track record of not voting if they have to compromise.
Because moderates will compromise a progressive policy to death. Where is the public option?
Its cool man, im 33 and I’ve voted democrat in every election. I always push left but I showed up for barack, hilary, biden, and kamala.
This neoliberal shit is not going to fly with leftists, maybe y’all do need to push further right, hell why not just amalgate with republicans? Fuck it, its a a diverse nation afterall.
See ya in 2 years, where I’ll tow the party line again and get blamed for its loss again somehow.
What do you mean by “where is the public option?”
The public option in the affordable care act that was killed by Joe Lieberman?
Maybe if they ran a fucking left-wing candidate they might.
There are some left wing candidates in local elections, but they don’t get votes either
No offense, but that’s so vague it’s almost meaningless. What candidates? What elections? When?
I can tell you that progressive legislation had a lot of wins last week, with voters passing minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, abortion protections, and union protections while rejecting school vouchers in 3 states. Progressivism did a lot better than Centrism last week.
Then they would lose votes from moderates and lose again
The sheer number of trump voters I’ve heard say they were originally gonna vote for Bernie is larger than you would imagine.
People are angry the system is rigged, trump channels that anger and says he will solve it. Granted he won’t and they’re dipshits for believing him, but that’s how it goes.
100% of Trump voters I’ve met call Biden and Kamala radical leftist that are responsible for inflation and many other things.
I’m sure there are some fringe trump voters that would vote for Bernie but not enough.
Trump has foreign bots, the billionaire class and republican propaganda machine all helping him.
Bernie would be depending on donations from lower income workers.
I am talking about the voter swing required for trump and GOP to sweep the whole government. That isn’t because of Trump supporters, they would vote trump if he personally knifed their mother in front of them. That is because of disenfranchised fence sitters who put zero effort into educating themselves and then vote for a change of leadership off of a gut instinct that a different person cant do worse. Its ignorant and wrong, but look no farther than worldwide elections this year showing a huge ousting of incumbent officials. Inflation has been unreal, and the uneducated think the president controls literally everything (see the “I did that” stickers on gas stations nationwide) People want change but they don’t know how to get it, and here is a man yelling and screaming about how he is going to change shit.
I know its difficult to imagine being this ignorant, but i truly believe this is how a lot of people operate. Its not malice, its ignorance and apathy.
I would vote for Bernie but in my experience many voters are closer to the middle of the ideological spectrum than far left or right.
This is very true, a lot of people get wrapped up in their bubbles, either the internet bubble or their own personal bubbles, so they believe the bubble when it says “everyone is left or right” but theirs a ton of people sitting in the middle just apathetic towards being invested politically.
The kicker is that those people in the middle are villanized by both sides as being a part of the other side. Instead of them trying to bring them to their ideology, they push them away. But this was what the constant polarization through wedge issues get you, an easily divided populace that is divided fighting about things the political figures on either end don’t actually care about, so you vote for those issues instead of the ones that prevent the ever increasing cancer that is billionaires.
Its all a distraction.
There not getting votes from moderates now! Why is it somehow smart and good to go, “wow, moderates didn’t vote for us, I guess we have to get more moderate,” but it’s somehow dumb to say, “the left didn’t vote for us, maybe we should go more left?”
Especially because, according the Pew Research Center, you’re, “the left doesn’t vote,” premise is a lie, and people on the far-left and far-right are more likely to vote, donate, and attend rallies than people in the center?
What makes you think moderates arent voting for democrats?
Because they keep fucking losing when they try to pick up moderates. In 2016, Chuck Schumer makes a grand prediction that Democrats will pick up two moderates for every one working-class voter they lose. Turns out they just lost working class voters. A NY Times study showed that hidden Trump voters were much more likely to be moderates. 2020, Biden went much farther to the left than Hillary, and he did better than her with not only moderates but conservatives. Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney to try and flip moderates, and she wound up doing 11 points worse than Biden with moderates.
The Democrats won big with a moderate message exactly once in 1992 when Bill Clinton beat Bush, and they’ve been chasing that high ever since, even though they keep losing. Gore? Moderate, loser. Kerry? Moderate, loser. Obama? Progressive (at least in platform, he pivoted hard to the center almost immediately), winner. And we’ve already been over Hillary, Biden, and Harris.
The data is in. Chasing moderate voters is a much worse strategy than having a robust, progressive platform. But they keep doing this, and they keep losing. It’s ridiculous.
Biden catered to moderates in 2020 and wouldn’t have won without them.
So you are wrong. Moderates are voting for democrats.
Yeah, no shit, that’s literally in my comment! Maybe try rereading it and getting back to me.
You Charlie Browns types are just actually incapable of learning, huh?
I learned that “leftists” on lemmy claim they won’t vote unless dems act in a way that would lose votes from other groups. It’s an obvious bad faith argument.
“Leftists” on lemmy aren’t willing to compromise and claim they won’t vote for dems unless dems have the same attitude and also don’t compromise.
America isn’t made up of leftists though so you can’t win in a diverse democracy without compromise.
Lol, okay buddy.
I’m not so sure about that. As an outside observer, it seems pretty obvious to me that the lack of a left vote in the US is because they do not have a notable left wing party. The best way to win someone’s vote is to represent them. If nobody represents someone nobody will get that vote.
Obviously to actually fix that you’ll need election reform, this is pretty much the expected outcome of a single vote FPTP winner-take-all system.
While I agree, it would probably help if the Dems actually tried being left-wing for once, rather than always trying to be Republicans-lite
Why vote for a right-wing campaign?
Have they stopped teaching politics in school or something?
Because the center right to right wing Dem leadership simultaneously ignore the wishes of the Left and take them for granted, offering them little to nothing in the way of improvements to the atrocious status quo.
Give people something to vote FOR, instead of only a greater evil to vote AGAINST, and you’ll get much higher voter turnout.
For example, another received wisdom is “young people don’t vote” and guess what? When they were given the chance to vote for their bodily autonomy in Kansas, young women voted at a higher rate than men of any age combined.
The last time the Dems campaigned on going further left, 2008, was their biggest win in decades. When Obama then governed further to the right and campaigned for reelection accordingly, he won by a MUCH smaller margin.
and you’ll get much higher voter suppression.
You mean turnout here?
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out 😄
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Billionaires buying votes, China and Russia trying to get Trump reelected, republican propaganda that causes voters to ignore reality.
You: how could the DNC do this to us?!
SMH
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How dare you suggest that the best way to get my voice represented is to use my voice in the first place.
