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Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
It helped having a President who pissed everyone off though. Maybe with some work we can turn some of the centric Republicans to the left a bit, if we can show having power to the left means results. It isn't over, it hasn't even started yet.
It can in countries with an actual political spectrum and multiple parties spread across all points of that spectrum.
Less so in a country with only a binary choice like the USA has.
It doesn't work but they pretend it does because that way the donors get what they want and they get to "appear" to be trying, when in fact they're not. Covert Republicans and controlled opposition.
You could argue this happened in 1992, and it would also be the last time centrism won an election. In 1992, Democrats had basically given up on the political hegemony that had defined them since WW2, and accepted the political hegemony of neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan. And they won on it. It won an election for them.
And since that time, Democrats have been convinced that they had to run to the center to get "moderate" voters, when in reality, "centrist"/"moderate" voters never actually manifested. It was a middling black-swan event, but what it did, is it gave corporate democrats a hall pass to permanently assume a thing about a thing that didnʻt exist or even actually happen.
The very principal of a left versus right spectrum, represented as a normal distribution, is a construct of liberalism^1^. Its a way to represent an assumption about how voters think and behave and are distributed. And you are under no obligation to accept this construction. And when this construction has to get pushed up against reality; real actual voters with real actual data, it falls apart^2^. And this is because voters are messy, complicated, contradictory things. And this should be an obvious explanation because actual voters are actual people, and actual people are messy, complicated, contradictory things. A scientific materialist should faithfully reconstruct the models, push the models against the data, and reject the models which donʻt match the data. Any rational person who has borne witness to the previous decades of politics should recognize how the liberal construction of voters behave doesnʻt map to the data. It canʻt predict outcomes. There are ways of analyzing politics which do predict future states. But if you narrow your view to what assumptions liberalism demands you make, youʻll struggle to predict future state of politics, which is the ultimate test of any theory. If
You are not obligated to accept the assumptions of liberalism. And if the assumptions of liberalism dont predict beyond the data theyʻre trained on, you should reject those assumptions. You are not immediately obligated to accept other assumptions. In science, we reject theories all the time when the evidence tells us to, and sometimes that leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about how that system works. But it is better to be uncertain than it is to be comfortably wrong.
1: I consider liberalism to be the parent philosophy of democratic liberalism, republican conservatism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism; all of these extension find their roots in liberalism. Two philosophies not finding their roots here are social democracy (roots in marxism), and american fascism (roots in nazism/ european fascism).
2: I can go into explaining this, but I want to keep the argument brief. The case involves multivariate analysis and stats.
S+ tier comment, in the words of my generation. I love it.
I realise why we've got so invested in certain framings of reality using different political lenses (conflict theory, my beloved) because it touches on literally every parts of our lives and our value systems.
But at the end of the day, it's just a system used to organise us. I've seen similar tiffs arise at work over co-op versus owned, kanban versus sprints, matrix versus pyramid, and it's the same kind of shit except for the scale: who benefits, who makes decisions, why do we do it. Real questions with concrete answers that we can experiment on and change our approaches—and keep changing them.
But just like with trying out workplace arrangements that would benefit the vast majority, there are people invested in the status quo for a variety of good and bad reasons.
We should be able to talk plainly and soberly about these things as long as we all agree that human flourishing is the ultimate goal of any system we build or reproduce.
Yeah, this is it. I appreciate the uncertain language of whether or not centrism "won" the 1992 election as well. It really is just an oversimplification where everyone but the establishment loses. The results from the last decade or so should be data enough to show that the way things are measured is fundamentally broken. While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm is still the pervading "default" mode of thinking in the meta of American Politics, but it's increasingly coming under more scrutiny, especially after this last election once again failed to produce predictions that had the results within their parameters. I think a good portion of that lies in this weird idea that many dem and even academic circles are getting recently that "populism is a right-wing thing", which is once again predicated on the paradigm of left/right liberal/conservative. Almost like people really aren't that simple or something...
I'm sure it is very convenient to the reigning political duopolies in the world to have people self-organise into two broad "teams."
I've seen it happen in real-time, where I'll agree with someone on 90% of the facts, but then we're off on the last 10℅ and suddenly we consider eachother wholly on the "other side."
Then if you're already labeled as being on one side or the other, and you have two major politicians representing just these two broad sides with barely any room for nuance, who are you going to vote for? Some loser 3rd party isn't on a team, and just has human opinions??
Anyway yeah
Centrism won 2020, kinda. Exactly because of the president who pissed everyone off first
Centrism didn't win 2020; Biden adopted a lot of Bernie's platform and even then only won because of COVID. Trump overwhelmingly won the conversation on kitchen table issues.
Covid helped Trump by masking the effects of his economic policies. I'd say that Biden won despite Covid rather than because of it. Did you mean "because of Trump's failure of a response to Covid"? Because that I could get behind.
That's my point, yes. Plenty of people voted for Biden because they wanted someone who would handle COVID like an adult, which Trump was not willing to do. Given how tight the race was it's very likely Biden would've lost if he didn't have that to campaign on.
It feels like a safe trap to fall into. Republicans have the easier task because they just cater to where people are and use fearmongering to get there. Ends justify means. But it's nonconstructive. Blind lead the blind. To me that's definitionally conservatism. When lost, Democrats feel they just need to be Republican-lite (or they are themselves compromised assets -- like Sinema, Fetterman, Schumer, etc.).
Democrats have to actually persuade and have a vision and lead the electorate, which can be a harder task. When they have charismatic leadership who can sell this with conviction, this is when they succeed. Especially when as you point out the other side is fresh off of being exposed for the grifters they are (gas prices, etc.)
The fear mongering works because liberal centrists always fail. Democrats has just to be a real opposition that do what rhey preach and abide with international laws
There's a superseding point. The fearmongering works because the electorate is uninformed and misinformed by megaphones of fearmongering from conservative billionaire megaphones and erosion of education and diversification of media. Yes, we should've stuck with FDR's New Deal approach and his desire for a Second Bill of Rights. But the Business Plot 2 (Reagan) and 3 (Trump) won -- especially with aid from foreign interference most notably Russia and Israel but possibly China too.
This makes those who try to do the right thing less palatable to the masses because Fox News & Friends is telling them that any leftist is the literal devil.
Not an easy task to overcome, but tell me a viable path for how we put a Mamdani, AES, AOC in Arkansas and Alabama and I'll listen.
Just a note on the FDR comment - I love history, not an expert in the details, but most of FDR's deals dried up and were discontinued because at the time it seemed their need was done. WWII made unemployment practically disappear, and much of what FDR did was to try and give jobs to everyone. A lot of the rest went away once liberal Republicans (Eisenhower) got taken into the Democrat side as Dixiecrats planned their takeover. Reagan was the first major result of that move, and it took over the country fast since businesses loved it.
If people did not notice their lives getting worse due to failure of liberal a lot of them will not fall into the propaganda that immigrants are the source of all problems. Instead of understanding the root causes and try to solve it people like prefer to complain about regular people ans whitewash the liberals failures leading to more people voting for fascism
The more progressives that respect their engagement wins , the more it will be easier to win in harder places
That didn't stop conservatives whose lives continue to get worse voting for Republicans in Arkansas and Alabama, so I'm not understanding your point?
I'm 100% all for getting more progressives in office, fully embrace a Social Democratic Nordic Model — but I'm still not seeing this viable path to actually getting even a liberal let alone a progressive candidate on the ballot and to vote for in the likes of Arkansas and Alabama.
And are you American? I see you moderate Europe, so perhaps there is a disconnect in one's understanding of our electoral system and the breadth, depth, and pulse of this nation and its particular states' electoral makeup.
The electoral college is a problem for those states, but if that can be tackled, two of Alabama's districts fell to blue this time, and one of Alabama's got reasonably close, mostly because of urban Little Rock's votes.
Rural is going to vote red until they realize, through years of results and through educational messaging, that Republicans aren't going to ever help them.
Yeah I absolutely believe from here through 2028 the most progressive members of the coalition should be going to these places -- kind of how AOC and Bernie reached out to rural voters in West Virginia this past cycle.
It's the only way to make inroads and to short-circuit the onslaught of money and propaganda that comes from their televisions, social media algorithms, and churches.
My only point is that there comes a point when you must make a choice between two non-ideal candidates, and take what you will. I'm doubting these candidates had the most progressive platforms in the general election, but hey, they did elect their first open trans state legislator (I assume that's a gerrymandered district, much how Maxwell Frost can win uncontested in FL).
Conservatives always wins after the democrats and worldwide liberals centrists fail. Look at France, le pen has big chance of being next president after Macron centrism failed and led to civil disobedience. It took
I've already acknowledged agreement of the problem; the question is implementation of a solution. If I could magically snap my fingers and put a Mamdani, AES, AOC, Talarico in every single seat in government, I would.
But again the forces of money and how poorly educated the electorate is means sometimes persuasion to vote for a better candidate doesn't come in time, and then we must choose between Center-Right and Far-Right because the electorate only voted for these two choices, given the paradigm I laid out in my original comment.
We are not agreeing though you think money and poor education is what make conservatives wins while I think it is liberalism failures that create that reality. I don't know how you still talk about the force of money when people outspent by 9 times still wins. Nothing happen in a snap of a finger. People used to say Americans would never elect a Black president. People like you said America would never elect an openly pro-Palestine candidate, yet Mamdani won the mayorship. Then people like you moved the goalposts to winning a senate seat, and once again, you were proven wrong. It took 94 years for Democrats to win again in Kansas. I think nothing is impossible when people who already vote decide to vote for change instead of being defeatists. The more that people who already vote, vote the right way, the more people who never voted will start voting, slowly but surely.
But my aforementioned point that went entirely ignored disproves your argument: People vote for conservatives over and over, even though it fails to create that reality even faster.
... Which means there's more to the story in persuasion of the electorate, and people duped into voting against their own interest.
Ergo, the fearmongering. Ergo the money. Ergo the propaganda and megaphones of misinformation.
Yes, Democrats won Kansas, but it wasn't a progressive who won it. They're just a stepping-stone along the way to the progressivism which you and I both seek.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I supported Obama from primaries, and I supported Mamdani. I was one of the earliest supporters and campaigners for Bernie in 2015, but still voted Hillary when it was her or Trump at the end. I feel one has strawmanned me for positions I've never taken.
Yes, centrist candidates tend to perform well in two-party systems. However, in systems with open primaries and/or two-round systems, centrist candidates can struggle to reach the final round. Indeed, US politics became much more polarized after the introduction of open primaries.
two-round systems (which are the same as open primaries) have not been implemented nearly widely enough to have such an effect, and where it is implemented it doesn’t do that because of how safe these states are for a certain party.
Not widely enough...? Two-round systems are rather common globally.
You need their votes to win any election.
You can't even get your own voters to show up (2 million Ds sat out the last Presidential election).
You need independent votes to win anything. There aren't enough Ds or Rs (28% each). Without independent support (of which centrists are the majority, two thirds) you lose. Every time.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/fact-sheet/party-affiliation-fact-sheet-npors/
Math never lies. Partisans do