I think this assessment is unfortunately correct. The cultural left is so used to winning that it is seen as blasphemous to moderate on any cultural issue, or as they sanctimoniously call it, a 'civil rights issue'. Conservative surrender on issues like gay marriage has unfortunately vindicated their 'right side of history' narrative, where their opponents admit they were right.
Even worse is that even if Democrats pretend to be moderate on culture to get elected, there's nothing to stop them simply lying and then going full throttle when in power, as well as appointing dyed-in-the-wool progressives to the court to be there for decades. This is what arguably happened with Barack Obama in 2008. Whilst on economic moderation they usually mean it, on cultural moderation they're nearly always lying.
Only way this stops is if a different base is built, different from university-educated progressives. It was the decline of blue-collar workers as an alternative base for left-wing parties which gave absolute power to the activist class.
Healthy political cultures always have a 'left' and a 'right', but often populist parties only focus on expanding the power of their political party directly, and not shaping an ideal 'opposition' which they will eventually hand power to. This needs to change. We need to think about what an acceptable 'left' would look like.
Best bet to me is absolutely crippling the university system, public service sector, NGOs, whilst actively trying to 'turn back the clock' to a wider share of the workforce in manufacturing. A lot of these ideas are luckily being planned by the incoming Trump administration, though their success is an open question.
I also think that Trump-aligned donors should give money to a 'new type of Democrat' in the hope of creating a 'Culture War New Labour Moment'.
History suggests that this stuff goes in cycles. The cycle we're in right now has been particularly bad, but that doesn't mean it isn't ultimately just another repeat of the same cycle. While Trump seems to have defeated wokeshit in this election, the fact is, he's considerably more liberal on major cultural issues than the last Republican president before him, and most of his supporters have been willing to follow his lead on that.
This means that it's entirely possible we will see a respite from woke while the left recovers from the insanity of the past ten years. The binge is over and the hangover has set in, firmly nailed into place by Trump's victory this year. Marching orders will go out to put the wokeshit back in the closet for a while, where it will rest up and gather strength for the next binge of insanity 10-15 years from now.
That's my personal prediction. The crazies will never truly go away, of course, but their leash is held by cynical people who do not believe in any ideology and only care about getting power. The latter group will calculate, probably correctly, that the crazies have become an obstacle to them having power, and will tug the leash accordingly. Of course, I could be wrong! Part of me hopes I am. I'm not sure if it's better or worse for the left to keep going full retard until the end of time.
I don’t believe that history moves in cycles. You’re right that some left wing stuff has been locked in, like gay marriage. But we’re also seeing the birth of a genuine alternative counterculture which will continue to challenge the mainstream media / university / hollywood culture.
"The internal culture of democrat organizations makes it impossible for them to moderate." Cultures can change, but incentives can stifle change. What incentives make change impossible in the case of Democrats? I think the problem with the culture of the Democrats is that they are coupled to and sustained by people that traverse through an entrenched pathway of government-funded education, full of secular dogmas. That pathway is dangerous for everyone, but especially for people not possessing the ability and family support to think for themselves. Isn't the difficulty of the Democrats to change caused primarily by incentives of government-funded education?
I think you're very mistaken about how extreme the Democratic base is. Remember, this is the base that chose Joe Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016 over the more extreme alternatives. Sanders supporters love to claim that the primaries were "rigged," but this is obvious cope. They complain that the Party didn't let Sanders win with a plurality in 2020, and instead had all the non-Biden moderates drop out, but this is just the obvious way to avoid the spoiler effect and make the results more representative of the party base's will.
The reason that the party's base seems extreme is because you're only paying attention to the loudest people, the activists who are so extreme in their views that they think it's the most important thing in the world to promote them. A lot of those activists already hate the Democratic Party, though they usually think it's the lesser of two evils, and they're not its core base. Pandering to them is a mistake that the Party can definitely avoid if it commits itself to it (though it will be difficult because many of those people have become Democratic staffers). I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of Democratic voters were happy that Harris had moderated her positions, even if some of them only thought so because it would give her a better chance of winning. I know I was happy about that and wish she had been able to moderate even more.
Keep in mind as well that a lot of minorities in the Democratic base are actually conservative. Democrats are losing many of them for being too left-wing, but given that they compose a large proportion of the base, it's hard to blame the base for being too extreme.
And then you also have to take into account that the opinions of the base can change. People are usually at least somewhat rational, and if they see that extreme positions are losing elections, they'll likely moderate their positions or at least be willing to accept moderates. This is not just something party actors do - regular people do it as well. Also, base opinion follows elite signaling, at least to some extent. If Democratic elites signal that they need to moderate, most of the base will follow.
No, Sanders supporters are right. The primary WAS rigged against him in 2016. Joe Biden was on track to lose the primary nomination in 2020 until he cashed in political capital which he had accumulated in a different era. He called Jim Clyburn and asked Clyburn to rally the Black vote for him in the South Carolina primary. Clyburn agreed on one condition: Biden had to choose a black woman to be his VP.
The Democrat base believes in a bunch of insane pseudoscience and fake history. Most of them aren't going to moderate.
Even if that's the only reason Biden won, "A politician cashed in political capital to get the support of another, who rallied the base in his favor," is just a description of normal primary politics, not rigging. If the Democratic base didn't want Biden, they could have just ignored what Clyburn said and voted for Sanders. Biden only won because the majority of Democrats wanted him over Sanders. Consider: Was the 2024 election rigged because Trump gave RFK a Cabinet position in exchange for his support? How about giving Elon Musk DoGE in exchange for his support? Regardless of whether there's anything dubious about these, they definitely fall short of rigging.
Plus, I think the bigger reason Biden won is that Buttigieg et al. dropped out. Sanders never had any chance of winning a head-to-head matchup. He was only in the lead because of the spoiler effect. That means the Democratic base wanted a moderate, not Sanders, all along. And this shouldn't be surprising: If the Democratic base liked Sanders more than moderates, we should see a lot more Democratic politicians like Sanders, and fewer who are moderates. Instead we see the opposite: Sanders is the most extreme left-wing member of Congress, so much so that he's technically not even part of the Democratic Party because he's too far left for them. The moderate wing leads the party, even though they've made concessions to the progressives to maintain unity. They also composed the majority of Democratic elected officials (particularly in swing races), and seem to be increasing in power - progressives have been losing to moderates lately, even in solidly blue locations.
Also, even if the primaries had been rigged against Sanders, that would mean that the Democratic Party isn't beholden to its extreme base and successfully managed to thwart their wishes twice in a row. And they still won one of those elections, and only lost the other because of the Electoral College. So the whole argument that they can't moderate because their base is too extreme breaks down.
The comment that the Democratic base believes a bunch of pseudoscience is just repeating the assertion that the base is too extreme, which is the exact thing I'm arguing is false. I think you're just generalizing from the most extreme part of the base. And besides, if believing in pseudoscience was an electoral killer, the Republican Party would've been dead a long time ago.
I think the idea that everyone will become racial IQ hereditarians if the left isn't censorious is pretty silly. I guess you think that there are arguments for it that are so overwhelming that everyone would accept them if not for censoriousness, but if there are such arguments, they weren't presented here. The only argument you gave, which apparently is supposed to make hereditarianism obvious, is that humans have been evolving for a long time, so there will be genetic differences between evolutionarily separate groups. But your argument overestimates the amount of evolutionary separation between races by at least a factor of 10 (the groups of humans that evolved into the races we have today only separated tens of thousands of years ago, not hundreds of thousands, and there's been contact between those groups, and therefore interbreeding, for a long time). And no one denies that there are biological differences between different races - the question is whether these differences have any significant effect on intelligence. Since intelligence is important in all environments, there's no obvious reason why some groups would evolve to be more intelligent than others.
Also, even if everyone does come to be hereditarians, that doesn't automatically destroy leftism. It would destroy a lot of woke ideas, but those are the ones that we're saying the left should moderate away from anyway. Plus, there are some arguments that hereditarianism would actually make the case for left-wing ideas stronger (I believe there's an old Slate Star Codex post about this).
All politic parties change and adapt. Democrats will change as will Republicans. I am curious why you think that the U.S. being a nations of immigrants is a lie?
An immigrant is a person who moves to a place where people are already living and becomes part of that society. A person who moves to an uninhabited land and builds a log cabin is a pioneer not an immigrant. America was a nation of pioneers. The "nation of immigrants" line originated in the 1950s as a propaganda project funded by the ADL, an ethnic partisan organization.
>I mean that Democrats won't change in the next few decades. I don't think parties can change very quickly.
They don't necessarily have to change. Kamala was a very flawed candidate and even with her the gap was only about 5M votes. A more charismatic and just-as-woke candidate may win. Say, Gavin Newsome. I think it's wishful thinking to assume that they're now doomed, will never win again, or can only win by dumping their ideology.
I think this assessment is unfortunately correct. The cultural left is so used to winning that it is seen as blasphemous to moderate on any cultural issue, or as they sanctimoniously call it, a 'civil rights issue'. Conservative surrender on issues like gay marriage has unfortunately vindicated their 'right side of history' narrative, where their opponents admit they were right.
Even worse is that even if Democrats pretend to be moderate on culture to get elected, there's nothing to stop them simply lying and then going full throttle when in power, as well as appointing dyed-in-the-wool progressives to the court to be there for decades. This is what arguably happened with Barack Obama in 2008. Whilst on economic moderation they usually mean it, on cultural moderation they're nearly always lying.
Only way this stops is if a different base is built, different from university-educated progressives. It was the decline of blue-collar workers as an alternative base for left-wing parties which gave absolute power to the activist class.
Healthy political cultures always have a 'left' and a 'right', but often populist parties only focus on expanding the power of their political party directly, and not shaping an ideal 'opposition' which they will eventually hand power to. This needs to change. We need to think about what an acceptable 'left' would look like.
Best bet to me is absolutely crippling the university system, public service sector, NGOs, whilst actively trying to 'turn back the clock' to a wider share of the workforce in manufacturing. A lot of these ideas are luckily being planned by the incoming Trump administration, though their success is an open question.
I also think that Trump-aligned donors should give money to a 'new type of Democrat' in the hope of creating a 'Culture War New Labour Moment'.
History suggests that this stuff goes in cycles. The cycle we're in right now has been particularly bad, but that doesn't mean it isn't ultimately just another repeat of the same cycle. While Trump seems to have defeated wokeshit in this election, the fact is, he's considerably more liberal on major cultural issues than the last Republican president before him, and most of his supporters have been willing to follow his lead on that.
This means that it's entirely possible we will see a respite from woke while the left recovers from the insanity of the past ten years. The binge is over and the hangover has set in, firmly nailed into place by Trump's victory this year. Marching orders will go out to put the wokeshit back in the closet for a while, where it will rest up and gather strength for the next binge of insanity 10-15 years from now.
That's my personal prediction. The crazies will never truly go away, of course, but their leash is held by cynical people who do not believe in any ideology and only care about getting power. The latter group will calculate, probably correctly, that the crazies have become an obstacle to them having power, and will tug the leash accordingly. Of course, I could be wrong! Part of me hopes I am. I'm not sure if it's better or worse for the left to keep going full retard until the end of time.
I don’t believe that history moves in cycles. You’re right that some left wing stuff has been locked in, like gay marriage. But we’re also seeing the birth of a genuine alternative counterculture which will continue to challenge the mainstream media / university / hollywood culture.
I think this is largely true, which is why we are moving to a red state.
Keep in mind that in 10-15 years social security and Medicare will blow up, which will cause immense political chaos.
Why are you so racist? Did a black or brown person hurt you?
"The internal culture of democrat organizations makes it impossible for them to moderate." Cultures can change, but incentives can stifle change. What incentives make change impossible in the case of Democrats? I think the problem with the culture of the Democrats is that they are coupled to and sustained by people that traverse through an entrenched pathway of government-funded education, full of secular dogmas. That pathway is dangerous for everyone, but especially for people not possessing the ability and family support to think for themselves. Isn't the difficulty of the Democrats to change caused primarily by incentives of government-funded education?
I think you're very mistaken about how extreme the Democratic base is. Remember, this is the base that chose Joe Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016 over the more extreme alternatives. Sanders supporters love to claim that the primaries were "rigged," but this is obvious cope. They complain that the Party didn't let Sanders win with a plurality in 2020, and instead had all the non-Biden moderates drop out, but this is just the obvious way to avoid the spoiler effect and make the results more representative of the party base's will.
The reason that the party's base seems extreme is because you're only paying attention to the loudest people, the activists who are so extreme in their views that they think it's the most important thing in the world to promote them. A lot of those activists already hate the Democratic Party, though they usually think it's the lesser of two evils, and they're not its core base. Pandering to them is a mistake that the Party can definitely avoid if it commits itself to it (though it will be difficult because many of those people have become Democratic staffers). I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of Democratic voters were happy that Harris had moderated her positions, even if some of them only thought so because it would give her a better chance of winning. I know I was happy about that and wish she had been able to moderate even more.
Keep in mind as well that a lot of minorities in the Democratic base are actually conservative. Democrats are losing many of them for being too left-wing, but given that they compose a large proportion of the base, it's hard to blame the base for being too extreme.
And then you also have to take into account that the opinions of the base can change. People are usually at least somewhat rational, and if they see that extreme positions are losing elections, they'll likely moderate their positions or at least be willing to accept moderates. This is not just something party actors do - regular people do it as well. Also, base opinion follows elite signaling, at least to some extent. If Democratic elites signal that they need to moderate, most of the base will follow.
No, Sanders supporters are right. The primary WAS rigged against him in 2016. Joe Biden was on track to lose the primary nomination in 2020 until he cashed in political capital which he had accumulated in a different era. He called Jim Clyburn and asked Clyburn to rally the Black vote for him in the South Carolina primary. Clyburn agreed on one condition: Biden had to choose a black woman to be his VP.
The Democrat base believes in a bunch of insane pseudoscience and fake history. Most of them aren't going to moderate.
Even if that's the only reason Biden won, "A politician cashed in political capital to get the support of another, who rallied the base in his favor," is just a description of normal primary politics, not rigging. If the Democratic base didn't want Biden, they could have just ignored what Clyburn said and voted for Sanders. Biden only won because the majority of Democrats wanted him over Sanders. Consider: Was the 2024 election rigged because Trump gave RFK a Cabinet position in exchange for his support? How about giving Elon Musk DoGE in exchange for his support? Regardless of whether there's anything dubious about these, they definitely fall short of rigging.
Plus, I think the bigger reason Biden won is that Buttigieg et al. dropped out. Sanders never had any chance of winning a head-to-head matchup. He was only in the lead because of the spoiler effect. That means the Democratic base wanted a moderate, not Sanders, all along. And this shouldn't be surprising: If the Democratic base liked Sanders more than moderates, we should see a lot more Democratic politicians like Sanders, and fewer who are moderates. Instead we see the opposite: Sanders is the most extreme left-wing member of Congress, so much so that he's technically not even part of the Democratic Party because he's too far left for them. The moderate wing leads the party, even though they've made concessions to the progressives to maintain unity. They also composed the majority of Democratic elected officials (particularly in swing races), and seem to be increasing in power - progressives have been losing to moderates lately, even in solidly blue locations.
Also, even if the primaries had been rigged against Sanders, that would mean that the Democratic Party isn't beholden to its extreme base and successfully managed to thwart their wishes twice in a row. And they still won one of those elections, and only lost the other because of the Electoral College. So the whole argument that they can't moderate because their base is too extreme breaks down.
The comment that the Democratic base believes a bunch of pseudoscience is just repeating the assertion that the base is too extreme, which is the exact thing I'm arguing is false. I think you're just generalizing from the most extreme part of the base. And besides, if believing in pseudoscience was an electoral killer, the Republican Party would've been dead a long time ago.
I think the idea that everyone will become racial IQ hereditarians if the left isn't censorious is pretty silly. I guess you think that there are arguments for it that are so overwhelming that everyone would accept them if not for censoriousness, but if there are such arguments, they weren't presented here. The only argument you gave, which apparently is supposed to make hereditarianism obvious, is that humans have been evolving for a long time, so there will be genetic differences between evolutionarily separate groups. But your argument overestimates the amount of evolutionary separation between races by at least a factor of 10 (the groups of humans that evolved into the races we have today only separated tens of thousands of years ago, not hundreds of thousands, and there's been contact between those groups, and therefore interbreeding, for a long time). And no one denies that there are biological differences between different races - the question is whether these differences have any significant effect on intelligence. Since intelligence is important in all environments, there's no obvious reason why some groups would evolve to be more intelligent than others.
Also, even if everyone does come to be hereditarians, that doesn't automatically destroy leftism. It would destroy a lot of woke ideas, but those are the ones that we're saying the left should moderate away from anyway. Plus, there are some arguments that hereditarianism would actually make the case for left-wing ideas stronger (I believe there's an old Slate Star Codex post about this).
All politic parties change and adapt. Democrats will change as will Republicans. I am curious why you think that the U.S. being a nations of immigrants is a lie?
>Nation of immigrants
An immigrant is a person who moves to a place where people are already living and becomes part of that society. A person who moves to an uninhabited land and builds a log cabin is a pioneer not an immigrant. America was a nation of pioneers. The "nation of immigrants" line originated in the 1950s as a propaganda project funded by the ADL, an ethnic partisan organization.
>I mean that Democrats won't change in the next few decades. I don't think parties can change very quickly.
They don't necessarily have to change. Kamala was a very flawed candidate and even with her the gap was only about 5M votes. A more charismatic and just-as-woke candidate may win. Say, Gavin Newsome. I think it's wishful thinking to assume that they're now doomed, will never win again, or can only win by dumping their ideology.
I didn't say they were doomed. I said they wouldn't moderate. You're right that in a more favorable climate with a stronger candidate they may win.