BlitzFirst said:
Can we get back to what I posted though? I wasn't focusing on AOC...I was focusing on Democrats blaming Progressives for Biden not getting a Landslide win.
Anyone got anything to say about that kind of talk?
I really hoped that wasn't going to happen, as Sanders, AOC, and even Noam Chomsky immediately made it clear that voting for Joe Biden was imperative for whatever good you want to have happen in the future. The people I know who actually phone banked and wrote mailers for Biden were more likely to be activists from the Sanders camp than the centrists liberals trading memes on Facebook. The Progressives may not play on every stage, but they play very well in some districts, and we tend to forget that even centrist Dems are now touting more ambitious policies that Sanders brought to the table and normalized in 2016. There was no Jill Stein this year, and no indication that progressives protested with non-votes or Trump votes.
Polling shows that a majority of the American people support all kinds of policies deemed "extreme left," but the support disappears when the question is rephrased with select buzzwords designed to stoke fears. The right has won the messaging battle, even if they lose this election.
It's hard to deny that socialism was the best weapon the GOP had. It's as if they had the same playbook ready for Biden as they did with Bernie. I've had so many mind-numbing discussions with people who don't understand socialism at all, nor any idea how America has worked for the past 50 years. When the GOP wanted to take down the Iowa Dem in the race, they literally showed Bernie Sanders and AOC perched on her shoulder.
So yeah, the Left Wing of the Democratic Party wasn't likely to win over the electoral map of America. But I don't think they held back a Biden landslide, either. It's something murky and in the middle. Democrats fearing the extremes of Sanders rushed to the familiarity of Biden --- a candidate who had been in fourth place in the preceding primaries. They got a candidate who united the moderates, but they also got a candidate with the lowest enthusiasm numbers in decades. Few Democrats could recite what Joe Biden was for and what he would do about it: they just knew he wasn't Donald Trump. Like a lot of folks, I was rooting for Joe Biden to survive the debates, and he did. But I don't recall many people who found him inspiring. Most of us were yelling at the television, wishing Joe would jump on the incredible opportunities Trump was handing him. Joe has grown on me a bit the past couple months. I hope it continues.
The Democratic Party and the DNC in particular need to seriously rethink why this election was so close, and where they need to move in the future. Blaming progressives, particularly young progressives, is the single worst thing they could do.