this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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I agree with most of what you say about Biden (he's been more progressive than his Democratic predecessors, though that's a pretty low bar), but this statement just isn't true. Progressives showed up in 2020 to elect Biden, even though the DNC screwed over Bernie in the primaries. Despite what people believe, the youth vote was nearly as high for Hillary as it was for Obama, and more moderates went to Trump than Clinton. Progressives of course showed up Obama, since he ran a progressive campaign, but he governed in the center (his foreign and security policy was just right-wing).
The problem isn't that the people who want progress don't unite under a single banner. The progressives are always forced to unite under the Democrats' centrist banner, and then those same centrist block the progress. Take Biden's infrastructure plan; Manchin and Sinema made sure that all of the most progressive elements were stripped out of that plan. Progressives (like members of the squad) refused to vote for it without those provisions, but they were browbeaten by the centrist Dems who promised that those provisions would be passed soon in separate legislation. The progressives relented and that separate legislation was quickly abandoned.
The progressives always unite with the centrists, they rarely get anything to show for it, and they are constantly blamed for the centrists' loses. If this is the election where the progressives finally stop showing up for the centrists (and don't get me wrong, Trump is openly planning a fascist coup, so I pray to God it isn't), the blame should be on the centrists for 3 nearly decades of broken promises to progressives, not progressives who, "refuse to unite."
My perspective is, and i might just be reiterating what you have said, they unite under democrats then expect them to be progressives. It's just not going to happen. Yes the democrats will appease them and that is awesome progress but it won't be enough, for sure. There needs to be a concerted effort to make a change that progressives can build on. To me that is ranked choice voting or just plain getting rid of FPTP how ever you do it. The answer isn't to abandon the progress we've made, though, it's to expand on it.
Then I guess I don't understand what your point is. Young people need to go out and vote for the Democrats instead in order to make any progress, but they can't expect to Democrats to actually be progressive, but the Democrats will appease them (even though it really doesn't seem that way)...I'm really not following. Is your point that progressives need to unite behind the Democrats and keep pushing them if they're ever going to make progress? Because my point is that progressives have been uniting behind the Democrats in every major election and the Democrats actively block real progress.
Because you're working from a fabrication
Well, I'm old enough to remember when Joe Manchin killed the Build Back Better Act, when Barack Obama decided to bailout the banks and not mortgage holders, when Bill Clinton gutted welfare...the party went center-left (debatably center-right on some issues) back in the 90s because they decided that would be a better path to victory. If that's their strategy, fine, but then they aren't entitled to progressive votes.
And again, to his credit, I think Biden has tried harder than all of his predecessors to earn progressive votes: rescheduling marijuana, attempting go cancel student debt, proposing the BBB. He's certainly realized that he can't take progressive turnout for granted, much more than his party has. But Gaza is an albatross around his neck, and it's not the college protesters he needs to be worried about, it's the 300,000 Palestinian-Americans that are about to hand Michigan to Trump.