‘A Real Chilling Effect’: A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI Ruy Teixeira predicted Obama’s rise. Now he’s scorning DC’s liberal think tanks for caring more about diversity than class. https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...ixeira-american-enterprise-institute-00045819 excerpt: Ruy Teixeira is one of Washington’s most prominent left-leaning think-tank scholars, a fixture at the Center for American Progress since the liberal organization’s founding in 2003. But as of August 1, he’ll have a new professional home: The American Enterprise Institute, the longtime conservative redoubt that over the years has employed the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, and Robert Bork. Teixeira, whose role in the Beltway scrum often involved arguing against calls to move right on economic issues, insists his own policy views haven’t changed — but says the current cultural milieu of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.” “My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class.” We’re sitting in AEI’s elegantly furnished library. Down the hall, there’s a boisterous event celebrating the conservative intellectual Harvey Mansfield. William Kristol, clad in a suit, has just left the room. Teixeira’s untucked shirt and sneakers aren’t the only thing that seems out of place. “I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place.” *** Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.” welcome to my world. more at the link
The Democrats need to wake up and stop pandering to their extremes For the good of America, the governing party urgently needs to take on its own activists https://www.economist.com/leaders/2...-wake-up-and-stop-pandering-to-their-extremes excerpt: The country needs parties that actually represent voters, few of whom belong to the extremes. And yet Democrats too have fallen prey to their activists. Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom. If the Democrats are defined by their most extreme and least popular ideas, they will be handing a winning agenda of culture-war grievance to an opposition party that has yet to purge itself of the poison that makes Mr Trump unfit for office. The Democrats have begun to put this right, but they lack urgency. That may be because some of them blame their problems on others—as when the White House points to “Putin’s price hike” or the negativity of Republican politicians and the conservative media. Although there is something to this, the party also needs to ditch cherished myths that empower its idealists. One is that a rainbow coalition of disaffected, progressive voters is just waiting to be organised to bring about a social revolution. The truth is that those who do not vote are politically disengaged and not very liberal. Some black, Hispanic and working-class voters may well see each other as rivals or have conservative views on race, immigration and crime. Another myth is that winning over centrist voters is unnecessary, because Democrats’ fortunes will be rescued by grand structural reforms to American democracy that are tantalisingly within reach. The constitution biases the Senate and electoral college towards rural America, and thus away from Democrats. Some in the party dream of using a congressional supermajority to shift representation in Washington towards the popular vote by adding states to the union, amending the constitution or packing the Supreme Court. Yet even in better times, there is a slim chance of that actually happening. The greatest myth is that the party’s progressive stances invigorate the base and are off-putting only to the other side. Consider the governor’s election in Virginia in 2021. After favouring Mr Biden by ten percentage points in 2020, voters elected a Republican whose signature campaign pledge was ridding schools of critical race theory (crt). That concept has become a catch-all term for conservative gripes, some real and some fantastical. Republican attacks on Democrats as out-of-touch socialists ring true to many voters in the centre. The good news is that Democrats are showing signs of turning back from peak progressive. In San Francisco irate voters have recalled their district attorney as well as three school-board members whose zeal for ideological coups de théâtre neglected bread-and-butter problems with crime and schooling. Last year Minneapolis defeated a referendum to defund the police and New York chose a former police captain as mayor. All these causes were backed by non-white voters, including Asian-Americans in San Francisco and African-Americans in Minneapolis. Prominent Democrats running in battleground states are steering clear of the rhetoric that enthralled the party in 2020. more at the link
Democrats positions, even those by the more left-leaning members, are far less extreme than those held by the GOP. Moving more centrist won't win any GOP voters over. It might cause more progressive voters to vote for green party and other progressive alternatives.
You should run for president since you know everybody’s views on everything. I don’t vote but good luck
The GOP is just better at prodding anger and channeling anger, especially culture wars nonsense. They don't have to govern, they just have to keep the status quo.
Just because they are not as extreme does not mean they are not problematic, this is not an equivalency test. So progressives should hold the party hostage because they are doing what most of the party wants? So they would get none of what they want just because the party moved more centrist? Does that make any sense to you?
But in a two party system it kind of is an equivalency test. I think with the big tent concept there is always going to be the wide spectrum. Ideally they would take turns on positions make comprises etc. That is true for both moderates and progressives in the party. Of course in the dream world there would be 5 or 6 parties which would help force those compromises. One part of the coalition would get their way on one issue and in return support the position of the other group.
We tried (unsuccessfully) to recall him as governor. He apologized for calling a group of people collectively robbing a cargo train a gang, said he should have called them a group of folks. If you find yourself agreeing with Gavin Newsom, you may want to take another look at yourself, because he is hot garbage.
I think this is true for some of the culture war issues but I feel this rarely translates to the approval levels of most policy proposals. The Democratic base is failing to provide an appealing or attractive culture or persona to the average American, but at the same time policy-wise they are already well in line with the center of this country on the majority of issues.
