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Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
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Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
Come on. You are correct. She shouldn't have tried to make a nuanced argument in a world filled with idiots who don't read or listen and who are influenced by sound bites.
But the fact that the right was able to twist what she said into, "If you support Trump, you are deplorable," doesn't mean she was incorrect in what she actually said.
If the only way to win elections is to constantly tip toe around the feelings of white people who can't ever hear any type of criticism or they will be driven into the arms of a sexist, racist, xenophobic brain-dead idiot, then we are truly fucked. Because the only way Democrats are going to win is to actually look at their base and try to increase it instead of trying to capture the vote of hyper-fragile white people. And increasing that base means actually addressing issues that affect the expanded base.
TM
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The way for Democrats to win elections is to reframe what they're about so that white grievances aren't so salient. I think this is another way of saying that Democrats lose when they make an election about competence (HRC, Dukakis) because while everyone is generally in favor of competence, no one really cares to vote that way, and other issues (say, Willy Horton) dominate. If Democrats can find issues to run on that have a real salience to ordinary Americans, they can win. For Obama in '08, one of these was health care, and another was Iraq. On this view, you can think that neoliberalism's agenda of targeted tax breaks and retraining is the best thing since sliced bread, and yet no one turns out to vote for sliced bread either.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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