"Be advised: “Democrats are in danger of going too far left in 2018.” So warn Republicans like Mitt Romney and ex-Democrats like Joe Lieberman and public personae as diverse as James Comey and Howard Schultz. In recent months, the pundit class has determined that the party’s leftward lurch heralds the rise of a “liberal tea party”—a movement that could very well unmoor Democrats from their longstanding center-left traditions, in close imitation of the spiral of events that caused the Republican Party to turn sharply to the right in recent years."
"What’s fueling this argument? For one, more Democrats have rallied, either noisily or cautiously, around such policy innovations as “Medicare for all,” universal college and a universal basic income. That a smattering of Democratic candidates have elected to call themselves “democratic socialists” has only fueled the claim that such programs are “socialist.” “The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington,” warned New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently. (Debs and Harrington were self-identified socialists.)'
"But there’s something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought."
Ten years ago tonight, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America, with 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes.
They were talking about Beto O'Rourke the other day in the office. It would definitely be a blue waive if he won in Texas. All depends who shows up on election day.
"CURE was a seat-of-the-pants political party created by ordinary people fed up with the Democratic machine's stranglehold. "We didn't have political experience and we didn't have anyone else to run for mayor," Liddle said. "It wasn't naivete on our part. Bob was our only choice. Nobody else wanted to run."
"The CURE platform was built around an eight-point "Bill of Rights for Albanians" that challenged decades-long oligarchic rule of political boss Dan O'Connell and Mayor Corning. They blamed the city's stagnation on the 11-term "mayor for life." The reformers targeted inadequate public services, deteriorated city facilities, hostility toward business entrepreneurs, rampant cronyism, no-bid city contracts and retaliation against political dissidents."
"The thing that falls out of this kind of confirmation bias is a lack of empathy. Narcissists are known for being totally unempathetic, but this has a unique character. Bill Nye’s new show and the March for Science perfectly illustrate one of the fundamental contradictions of liberal ideology: the truth is both politicized and neutral in the way that science is alleged to be neutral. The level of cognitive dissonance here is incredible. There is no such thing as political neutrality. And this ideological contradiction creates a major problem: the fetishization of rationality. The fetishization of rationality means you think reasonableness paves the road to political office and, on an individual level, that anyone who opposes you is an idiot who can’t understand reality. Thus, you have no purchase on someone else’s perspective because you’re narcissistically invested in your own view—the “correct” and only perspective. Dissenters are just the unworthy."
"Like the majority of African-Americans in their 70s, Mr. Mohammad, a retired math professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, saw the Democrats as liberators for striking a deal on civil rights in the mid-1960s. He’s been a staunch Democratic voter ever since – until, he says, now."
“I’m done voting," he says, because it doesn’t do any good. Then adds: “Maybe you gotta be black to understand.”
"Disillusioned by what he calls unmet promises of the Obama era, evidence of state-sponsored disenfranchisement at the polls, and the rise of a new ethno-nationalist vanguard in Washington, he has joined the ranks of what some have called the vanishing black voter."
