Atrios weighs in on the election dispute between progressives and moderates:
A lot was going on in 2020, and an amazing thing about the Biden campaign (yes, I am praising it!) was that it did not go out there and start screaming about "thugs" and "freaks." To use the shorthand of the times, they pretty much embraced "wokeness" during a period of major social turmoil and then they won.
Hmmm. This is not how I remember things. During the primary Biden was practically the only candidate who pushed back against open borders. He loudly opposed defunding the police. He rejected Medicare for All and instead supported increased subsidies and a limited public option. He avoided woke language in favor of Bidenisms. Trans issues weren't on the radar. Biden was, by a good margin, the most moderate candidate in a field led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
As president, Biden moved to the left. But that's not how he got there. He got there with endless appeals to his working-class upbringing in Scranton and by being almost militantly moderate. He might not have engaged in much hippie punching, but he kept his distance from them.
My weak mind was pondering the major political party's war on women. The weak mind thought that young women observing and participating in this war might think that marriage and motherhood is not what looks like a future for them. War has consequences.
Wingnuts see a future of endless opportunity,
https://i.redd.it/icf3zqnl5h1e1.jpeg
Decades ago, as a callow youth, I read Eric Linkletter's "The Impregnable Women." A novel about women who get fed up with men and decide to deny them sex. Perhaps their time has come.
It's begun:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/09/us/4b-movement-trump-south-korea-wellness-cec/index.html
This story is also known as Lysistrata, written by Aristophanes.
Also a Todd Rundgren song off of -- apropo of nothing in particular, I'm sure -- Swing to the Right.
It doesn't matter that Biden was militantly moderate, all that matters is the public perception of what the Democratic primary was.
Sure, which seems to be a situation in which Democratic candidates are never judged by their actions or words but by whatever the worst conspiracy theory is in each person's mind.
Biden proposed the strongest immigration overhaul? 'He was soft of immigration and supported Trump's removal plan' whut?
Harris campaigned on more immigration courts to process asylum seekers immediately? 'She should have campaigned on it!'
Harris said she'd protect civil rights and follow the law. 'Harris supports predators in bathrooms! Harris threw trans people under the bus!'
It's all up is down.
What was in the immigration bill that Republicans objected to?
They objected to the fact that it might have worked, thus depriving Trump of the opportunity to campaign on doing the same things.
Look, I know that Kevin thinks all the Dems have to do is move to the right, especially on social issues (apart from gun control, abortion, and a host of other platform items that a broad spectrum of Americans support, even if they've convinced themselves that an authoritarian but in their mind kind ruler will help them). He's said it again and again. But does he have each time to set up a straw man in order to denounce it?
I have trouble naming a single pol in favor of open borders as opposed to some out there in the blogoverse, and as opposed to the Fox caricature that's so effective. If they think we should enforced borders while setting up a reasonable path to citizenship, that's just not the same thing. And Harris ran, I've said and and again, as a former prosecutor.
In the last NYC primary for mayor, not a single candidate, including several on the left in a famously progressive city, came out for defunding the police. On the national level, pols may have sometime said that Medicare for all would be effective and save money, but they know it won't happen, and their public statements apart from the Squad are all about increasing affordability. Harris is no different.
So where are the goods, Kevin. You talk the scary language of the right when you car to, but where are the goods?
Even the squad was about increasing affordability in the interim.
“ I have trouble naming a single pol in favor of open borders”
Open borders would be an *improvement* over the standard liberal position of “do nothing for regular legal immigrants and deport no one except serial felons”. At least the legal immigrants wouldn’t have to deal with USCIS anymore!
I keep stumbling over this wingnut obsession with "open borders." Have none of these people ever visited, let alone crossed, "the border? Either southern or northern? Or left the country via an easterly or westerly route?
And why am I even asking? These are the people who don't even seem to know that before you get to vote, your name and identity are checked against a list of Registered Voters, and only if you're on it and haven't been checked off as having voted already do you get that sweet, sweet ballot. (don't explain "provisionals" to me -- I know.)
Now, what was the topic? "Woke"?? Joe Biden gained the belated support of progressive Dems by telling them he'd move left, and then did. The only people who ever ran on "woke", as far as I know, are MAGA nuts.
Yeah, they want a 'closed border'. Have they ever read the label on their food? It came from Mexico. With a closed border, no food crosses. No tourists. Let alone asylum seekers.
Do they only eat frosted flakes with its corn syrup frosting on corn crackles in milk?
I tire of the one-dimensional "left-right" narrative.
Suppose I'm frustrated by excessive identity politics with its "vocabulary" dictates, but I support Medicare for All? Suppose I agree that the Iraq invasion was a war crime, but I fully support arming Ukraine against Russia? Suppose I think climate change is a deadly danger, but I think market mechanisms, not bans, are the best way to address it?
Am I "Left" or am I "Right"? Or "Centrist"? Or is the world I inhabit one with more than one dimension?
“ hippie punching‘
It is my firm belief that the “hippies” of yesterday are the Trump supporters of today.
What you're seeing with Atrios and others is basically the Face-Saving Consensus of the Left forming - that Biden ran to the center and it cost him in 2024 because they "didn't have an agenda worth voting for", blah, blah, blah, he would have won if he'd ran on their left-wing policies, etc.
All a bunch of nonsense to try and avoid the fact that the non-Presidential moderates won this time around against a shift towards Republicans and Trump, and that "deliverism" didn't get the votes.
"As president, Biden moved to the left."
I will grant you that he embraced organized labor and focused a lot of energy on creating manufacturing and other jobs for working men. But I don't think this is what you mean by "left." In which case, I am hard pressed to think of anything: the Biden administration pretended that LGBTQ people didn't exist; joined in the demonization of immigants; allowed a right-wing takeover of the schools; oh, an merrily financed the slaughter in Gaza -- basically surrendered on every culture war issue.
They did forgive a few student loans, if that's "left." But otherwise the Biden years were center right (sufficiently so to be embraced by the Cheneys, among others).