Centrist Democrats aim to lose 2020 elections

[spacemonkey]

The Dem's need two things.
1, common sense plan.
2, get over 2016.

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[exploited]

[Kane]

I find myself at odds with the far left but I don't know that I'm necessarily a centrist either. I just know that nobody appeals to me anymore. Everybody seems to be in a camp these days. This place is certainly no exception.

[exploited]

Definitely an enlightened centrist.

[Saz]

[exploited]

Enlightened centrists are a plague, to be clear. It is instinctual moderation confused with intelligence - these people will say shit like "The ACA was us moving left" or "Antifa is just as bad as Neo-Nazis" or "We must unite and cooperate with the right-wing in order to win." This isn't an actual political position, it is more of a personality defect than anything. No doubt Kane takes great pride in his imagined mediation, negotiation and conflict resolution skills - i.e. fence-sitting to maintain the status quo, never actually putting himself out there and pursuing real change. Just an ever-shifting enlightened middleman, totally responsive to the players on either side of him, with no core values of his own.

There is a difference, I think, between an enlightened centrist and a policy centrist. A policy centrist wants a mixed economy, with capitalism as the baseline and government/social policy as a means to correct market failures and excesses. This is the classical liberal position, and while I don't agree with it, it can at least produce effective governance, as it tends to side with pragmatism over ideology.

An enlightened centrist is as I've described above.

If the GOP made white supremacy an official policy plank - instead of just the usual dog-whistling and what not - people like Kane would just shift further right in terms of what they support. And they'd be "at odds" with the "far left," who are in reality are just capitalists who don't want people to get abused by government or corporations, who don't want people exterminated and degraded because of their race, and whose views are absolutely normal in every other civilized society whose overton window isn't so f**k.

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