What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
As Lonergan and Blyth put it in Angrynomics, the right has better tribal enforcement along the boundaries they care about. Like a football team with more fired up and cohesive fans.
The democratic party has two major problems;
Their leadership is technocratic and alienated along class lines from the voter base they’re trying to reach. Nobody trusts them to do anything more than run on focus group issues, then turn around the moment they get into power and fail to act on them. This is not isolated to American politics - France’s emmanuel macron is another really good example. The working-class voting base, more than any other group, has been burned too many times on this since clinton1 to get enthusiastic about a democrat candidate. They are almost immediately viewed - and rightly so - as being fundamentally untrustworthy. The DNC’s subsequent games with the 2016 primaries lost an entire generation of potential voters who now view themselves as disenfrachised party outsiders. Now that the senile party leadership is literally dropping dead in office, there is nobody left to replace them who have the blessing of those same aging party elites. From their perspective, they are under siege from without vs. the republicans, and within from the newbies. They well and truly did it to themselves by resisting the emerging organic self-interest of their replacements. Kronus ate his children.
Funding sources come from billionaires and the top .01%. Normal people no longer have the disposable income, even at >$250kpa, to make significant enough contributions to run effective election campaigns. This is a form of capture by the ultra-wealthy, and therefore it makes it very difficult to run a campaign on small donations. The political process is entirely captured by the owner class, because nobody else has the $$$$$$ to own anything at all, and now gets charged rents to keep them in usury. Corporate donors can’t be relied upon because they are simple organisms who act in their own best interest of making more money. This needed to be corrected in the 2000’s, and the opportunity was lost. Instead we used QE to prop up a zombie economic system which did not provide appropriate investment in the next generation of the population, nor did it appropriately invest in infrastructure. So instead of flying taxis, vibrant broadband-enabled online fora, high speed trains, electric vehicles, stable rural communities and walkable cities, we got NFT’s, crypto scams, decaying suburbs harboring increasing deaths of despair, ludicrously oversized and inefficient vehicles and auto-enshittifying privacy-destroying cloud capital phone apps. It’s a paper tiger that is now falling to pieces vs. other emerging global competitors because it has extracted every drop of value from its feeder resource pools and is now well into the process of self-cannabalizing. It is a pest economy in the final stages of ecosystem collapse.
Basically, the triangulation game is already played out, the dam has disintegrated and there’s no longer any useful opposition to the rightwards move, because in order to even be an oppositional force, it would require selfless multi-billionaire unicorns (hah!) to effectively sacrifice their family fortunes in order to fund and animate such a movement- whilst somehow political candidates capable of rebuilding five decades of broken promises and tonedeaf social positions regards to the working class come out of the woodwork as a fully-formed well-oiled political machine that both offers and delivers enough Good Things to budge the needle. The technocratic so-called “Abundance Agenda” currently being circulated amongst DNC circles fails to do this - in typical democrat fashion - by attempting to lobotomize the working class out of the picture and reducing them to a mute “consumer of ideas”.
I guess stranger things have happened, but I’m pessimistic on the outlook at this point, because they’d have to win against an entrenched radical political insurgency, with full control of the government, and near unanimous support of the owner class, that legitimately doesn’t want democracy to succeed anymore.
As long as the democratic party elite fail to engage in good faith, they will continue to lose. Even if they do, they’ll also have an uphill battle until they have demonstrated in terms of lived experience to a chronically abused electorate that they have the will and capability to deliver on their promises.
I agree with most what you’re saying but I think you’re minconstruing the abundance book. Ezra has been clear and very vocal about wanting to execute the goals of the left. He’s just calling for a more fluid mechanism that doesn’t put up dozens of roadblocks throughout the process. No one ever addresses the elephant in the room: the upper echelon progressive home owner class. This group alone is blocking every progressive movement indirectly while also spouting the usual progressive rhetoric.
The Tea Party, they obliterated the old GOP by not voting them and voting for their people instead. The DNC has kept their party under lock and key to avoid any of that happening.
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.
Let’s compare leftist strategies of never turning out with the evangelical strategy of driving massive turnouts.
Who has had better success shifting their party?
What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
As Lonergan and Blyth put it in Angrynomics, the right has better tribal enforcement along the boundaries they care about. Like a football team with more fired up and cohesive fans.
The democratic party has two major problems;
Their leadership is technocratic and alienated along class lines from the voter base they’re trying to reach. Nobody trusts them to do anything more than run on focus group issues, then turn around the moment they get into power and fail to act on them. This is not isolated to American politics - France’s emmanuel macron is another really good example. The working-class voting base, more than any other group, has been burned too many times on this since clinton1 to get enthusiastic about a democrat candidate. They are almost immediately viewed - and rightly so - as being fundamentally untrustworthy. The DNC’s subsequent games with the 2016 primaries lost an entire generation of potential voters who now view themselves as disenfrachised party outsiders. Now that the senile party leadership is literally dropping dead in office, there is nobody left to replace them who have the blessing of those same aging party elites. From their perspective, they are under siege from without vs. the republicans, and within from the newbies. They well and truly did it to themselves by resisting the emerging organic self-interest of their replacements. Kronus ate his children.
Funding sources come from billionaires and the top .01%. Normal people no longer have the disposable income, even at >$250kpa, to make significant enough contributions to run effective election campaigns. This is a form of capture by the ultra-wealthy, and therefore it makes it very difficult to run a campaign on small donations. The political process is entirely captured by the owner class, because nobody else has the $$$$$$ to own anything at all, and now gets charged rents to keep them in usury. Corporate donors can’t be relied upon because they are simple organisms who act in their own best interest of making more money. This needed to be corrected in the 2000’s, and the opportunity was lost. Instead we used QE to prop up a zombie economic system which did not provide appropriate investment in the next generation of the population, nor did it appropriately invest in infrastructure. So instead of flying taxis, vibrant broadband-enabled online fora, high speed trains, electric vehicles, stable rural communities and walkable cities, we got NFT’s, crypto scams, decaying suburbs harboring increasing deaths of despair, ludicrously oversized and inefficient vehicles and auto-enshittifying privacy-destroying cloud capital phone apps. It’s a paper tiger that is now falling to pieces vs. other emerging global competitors because it has extracted every drop of value from its feeder resource pools and is now well into the process of self-cannabalizing. It is a pest economy in the final stages of ecosystem collapse.
Basically, the triangulation game is already played out, the dam has disintegrated and there’s no longer any useful opposition to the rightwards move, because in order to even be an oppositional force, it would require selfless multi-billionaire unicorns (hah!) to effectively sacrifice their family fortunes in order to fund and animate such a movement- whilst somehow political candidates capable of rebuilding five decades of broken promises and tonedeaf social positions regards to the working class come out of the woodwork as a fully-formed well-oiled political machine that both offers and delivers enough Good Things to budge the needle. The technocratic so-called “Abundance Agenda” currently being circulated amongst DNC circles fails to do this - in typical democrat fashion - by attempting to lobotomize the working class out of the picture and reducing them to a mute “consumer of ideas”.
I guess stranger things have happened, but I’m pessimistic on the outlook at this point, because they’d have to win against an entrenched radical political insurgency, with full control of the government, and near unanimous support of the owner class, that legitimately doesn’t want democracy to succeed anymore.
As long as the democratic party elite fail to engage in good faith, they will continue to lose. Even if they do, they’ll also have an uphill battle until they have demonstrated in terms of lived experience to a chronically abused electorate that they have the will and capability to deliver on their promises.
I agree with most what you’re saying but I think you’re minconstruing the abundance book. Ezra has been clear and very vocal about wanting to execute the goals of the left. He’s just calling for a more fluid mechanism that doesn’t put up dozens of roadblocks throughout the process. No one ever addresses the elephant in the room: the upper echelon progressive home owner class. This group alone is blocking every progressive movement indirectly while also spouting the usual progressive rhetoric.
The Tea Party, they obliterated the old GOP by not voting them and voting for their people instead. The DNC has kept their party under lock and key to avoid any of that happening.
You’re misremembering.
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.