I'm not sure I buy into that whole right vs left political spectrum thing. I was actually a huge Ron Paul supporter several years ago for a variety of reasons, but most people would say that Paul was far right. These days, I like Bernie Sanders, who comes across as far left. How can that be? Going from such polar opposites. Well, I think the majority of people are somewhere in the middle and they'll vote for whoever they like the most as a person, which is why Clinton lost. She came across as untrustworthy, fake, scripted and a pile of other things. Trump came across as more authentic and I'm sure millions of Bernie supporters voted for Trump just to 'stick it' to Hillary and the DNC.

I wouldn't say that the Democrats are moving left because the establishment Dems (like Clinton and Biden) are firmly against Universal Health Care. The last thing they want to do is upset the Health Insurance Industry and Big Pharma, their main donors. However, millions of Americans are waking up to the idea that Universal Health Care isn't a 'leftist' thing. Sure, if you have a good health insurance plan through your employer, you are perfectly happy and secure and that status gives you something to feel good about, since millions of other Americans haven't worked hard for it like you have. The last thing you want is for some other guy, maybe an immigrant or a drug addict to have that same health care as you, especially if your taxes go up. So despite every other industrialised country having health care, you believe the concept is 'leftist' and vote accordingly. And Sanders would have destroyed Trump in the general election.

exactly.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

well, no dude. it's a myth perpetrated by the right. and you just listed a number of right wing propagandists who're promoting it. bravo.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Wait are you saying that a foxnews opinion piece and the daily wire are not the best sources for what is going on in the democratic party?

you're sort of moving off the point. democrats writ large, as a voting bloc - not a half-dozen party hacks who aren't there anymore - aren't tribal. they aren't trumpwashed. they aren't "putin is less my enemy than the democrats."

their problem is they aren't brainwashed. the reason left wing hate radio doesn't work is democrats aren't prone to tribal hate, as a group (yes there are exceptions, just as there are republicans still in the party who aren't wedded to the cult of trump).

the flip side is that they aren't wedded to an ever-narrowing list of drop-dead requirements to satisfy party orthodoxy (i.e., the wall, as if it's the alamo). why don't democrats have the same fear of getting primaried from the far side of their party? why did only one incumbent democrat lose his primary? because the party broadened. just as did the republican party post-carter.

the other narrative i hear is that the democratic party is at war with itself. this narrative, and the party-is-lurching-left narrative, can't both be true. yeah, there is a far left wing of the democratic party. always has been. the only reason you're noticing it is because it's energized. but if the democrats take back the house in november it will be due almost exclusively to the centrist democrats who're winning the primaries in the districts in play.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

no. those are the more normal ones. i mean this guy, who refers to himself as a "capitalist evangelist".



and whose most recent podcasts are entitled, "liberals: radical, crazy and getting worse," and "have liberals become domestic terrorists."

some people are just so endemically brainwashed that there just is no route back. there's no rope long enough to stretch down to the bottom of that shaft.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA



HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Ho-ly-fucking-shit! I have said this for decades - GOP voters look for the "perfect candidate." Donkeys look for the the "D."

You are delusional.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

this is your default when your thesis loses ground. but i'll stop here; you can have the last word. wind up and throw hard, bro.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I like you. I really do. But, you live in a bubble.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

i like you too. but, your MO is, 2 or 3 posts, then the insults. i can talk it thru. you can't. well, you could. but you don't. and it's not because i'm in a bubble. it's because you can't win a hard side-by-side race. you can only win when the comp is weak. so i'm out.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I thought I got the last word.

You can keep saying that all you want. But, your biggest trait is your dismissiveness. It is the primary trait of the limousine liberal and the one you employ on a regular basis. You never want to actually debate. Never. You pick only the portions of the response to which you want to respond, usually out of context, and fail the address the rest. You do it all the time.

So, keep it up. You and your ilk are the fuel for the Trump supporters. Period. Hard stop. Keep it up and we all get to suffer the consequences.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

This very much points to my theory of being tone deaf.
I like hearing opposing opinions if they are well presented and the presenter is open to discussion.
I have friends who post false stories on Facebook. No matter how politely you point out the article is fake, they assume you agree with the negative aspect of the story and very quickly friends from other circles start piling on the one word labels.
I vote candidate, not party. Just like Republicans, Dems vote party over candidate. And many Dems feel if you are not 100% aligned with their views, you're Neanderthal.
Both parties have the same level of issues. But if somebody skews to one party, they largely ignore their party's issues and claim superiority over the other party.

JSA makes a point that is continually lost on the Dems. Their quick use of labels have even middle of the road people voting for Trump.

I'm butchering a movie scene, but in Platoon an officer knows his troops are overrun so he calls for bombs to be dropped on his location. Then he says "what a lovely fucking war." I think that scene pretty well describes Trump's election.

Never mind. I found it. Ironically, I actually skimmed over that article this morning.

Do you think you quoted it in the proper context?

https://www.google.com/...istory-lesson-219006

if you've ever seen that, especially here in this community, i'd like to see an example. because, not only have i not seen "many" democrats behave this way, i've never seen one behave this way.

can i ask you to consider another possibility? that limbaugh and his ilk basically tell their audiences, you might not be booksmart, but as opposed to the coastal elites who're looking down their noses at you, your needle is pointed in the right direction. they're highly educated. you're not. but you're the salt of the earth. how dare they make you feel inferior!

what's the listener's takeaway? who is really impressing the message on trump voters that they're dumber than liberals?

hillbilly elegy was one of the top-3 best selling books in every state in 2017, often ranked higher in blue states than in red. i think a lot of liberals wrestled to understand the mind of the conservative voter, whereas limbaugh's message, hannity's message, was not to understand why liberals think the way they do, but to sneer at them.

but i'll grant you this: when a person not only willingly abandons his attachment to truth, science, scholarship, but sneers at the "elites" who value such, yeah, there is a point when you force others to reckon with the person you've chosen to be.

and i'm glad you bring this up, because i think it reinforces my point in this thread. when you say, "100% aligned with their views," what views? the republican party did a nice job of bringing in disparate views in the 1980s. now the republican party is doing precisely what you say: purging from the party those who don't align 100 percent with an ever-more-strict doctrine. the democrats happen to be doing, now, what the republicans did well in the '80s: reckoning with the disparate views of a very broad coalition.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I do not listen to Limbaugh because his views are very biased so I will have to take your word on what he says. As I mentioned, my frame of reference is from friends on Facebook. We are friends in real life from high school but that was many years ago. A number of their views and their current circle of friends are very quick to label if you do not agree or if you call out an article that is fake. I see it very frequently.
I think most in the LR are just right of center and I don't think you see the behavior I'm referencing all that often here.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons appears to believe this myth perpetrated by the right. Is he a right wing propagandist too? Or is he under their influence? Maybe he’s just a big Limbaugh or Hannity fan.....
https://www.google.com/...ay.com/amp/777600002

That result can be spinned many ways but no serious person can say it really means anything. About 16K votes to 12K votes. Percentage wise big victory. But vote total is less than 12% of registered Democrats in the district.

Four thousand votes is no evidence of political swings in the democratic party. One day of campaigning put more people in the audience for these guys:

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________
It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

And this is core to your original point. The republican party has moved far far right,

Except for economic issues where they now seem to be okay with large debt and that was a strongly held "non-negotiable" only a few years ago. I'm not sure if Free Trade is considered left or right but it was certainly championed by the Conservative icon Reagan and now the Republican Party is embracing protectionism and doing away with trade. In my view, it's the Republican Party that has lost it's identify as I really have a hard time trying to figure out where they stand now on a number of issues.

As for the Democrats, I don't think anyone knows since there seems to be a big vacuum in terms of leadership. Not sure if the Party will swing towards the Bernie Sanders spending or the more traditional policies of Clinton.

Surely you must have a wide set of friends that don't engage in that, right? Where do you live now? What about the people that you interact with on a daily basis? My experience differs. Most of my Facebook friends are on the left or middle. They are often appalled by policies nowadays, yet, whenever they post a "fake" story, friends pile on them to not post that crap. My handful of friends on they right pretty much post non-stop propaganda, and tend not to care and don't get called out. My actual friends/colleagues in real life tend to span a wide gamut that still skews left, but almost all of my moderate and conservative friends reject Trumpian politics. Of course, I happen to be in Silicon Valley, YMMV....

 
Most of my friends who are also on Fasebook don't engage in politics there. Those who bring up politics the most, as well as most passionately, are liberal.
I live in Austin(liberal). I'm in construction (conservative).

I skewed strongly towards Republican growing up.

I went independent when Bush Sr. threw his arm out patting himself on the back about passing legislation although it took an extra 6 months
and cost a lot of people their jobs. The issues that are important to me do not neatly align with any one party.

The point that keeps getting made for me is if you tend towards liberal, the view is liberals are being pounded on daily meanwhile they are mostly innocent.
Conservatives often feel the same way.

Hey Midwest. Have you ever heard of the concept of goal post moving? =)


You seem to be universally confusing two concepts:

1.) What you yourself now consider leftist.
2.) Whether the Dem party has moved left over the years.

You wanting to redefine what leftist means is pretty much defacto evidence of a shift left.

They're the future of the party, brohomino: ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

perhaps we're just talking past each other. i absolutely think conservatives are getting hit from all sides, if by conservatives you mean true conservatives who see thru trump's con. my thesis here is a democrat today has the freedom to hold many of your views. a republican used to have that freedom, but does not anymore. i'm differentiating between a republican and a conservative. (and i'm talking about rank and file voters, not the apparatus of either party, which is useless and feckless.)

you think there are "many democrats" who'll pound you for not endorsing 100 percent of their views. i just don't see that. ever. at all. if you look at the party apparatus in my state, california, i would never join that party. but in my district, the democrat running for the US house is a law and order daughter of a cop, a rural, farming gun advocate, a small business deregulator who took down the front-running progressive in the primary. my own republican house member is so scared of his own shadow he is infamous for never saying anything. he'll likely lose in november because he's known as a moral coward even among republicans. this is the sort of person who'll get pounded if he doesn't endorse 100 percent of his party's views.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

The Democratic party is in the midst of a civil war, with its increasingly growing (and rabid) left-wing (not center-left, because that's rapidly shrinking) base wanting to pull it farther to the left than its ever been. So OF COURSE the Dems would like to abolish I.C.E., though cooler heads in the party's leadership are feverishly working to tamp down the calls for abolishment (by the ever-dull NY senator Kristen Gillibrand, for one) and desperately trying to duck any and all questions about I.C.E., hoping the fervor they've demonstrated recently for doing just that doesn't stick around in voters' minds, come November.






Polls show solid support, as it turns out, for both immigration enforcement as well as tightening of the border, the beliefs of the more wild-eyed among the Democrats notwithstanding. No wonder their leadership are hoping that the calls to get rid of I.C.E., as well as calls for open borders among a great many Democrats, will go away soon. (My hope is that both the Dems and the GOP Stupid Party trip all over themselves in the fall.)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."