Kondracke: "New Democrats" Outnumber Liberals
I don't care much about the "pizazz" part.
What they need to do is stop with the constant revolution. Constant, radical, little-understood change is a blueprint for disaster. There's no reason that liberal goals need to be conjoined with spastic, disorienting, socially hazardous, implausible, poorly-thought-out lurches to the left--especially multiple ones at any given time, or in rapid succession. If Dems want more porous borders, then enforce current laws and policies and argue for loosening them up. Work for protections for sexual orientation--a reasonable idea--and try making the case for protections for "gender identity"--a very different and far less plausible idea. (An idea no one had even heard of ten years ago.)
It's making the case that the progressive left is awful at.
I currently think that the far progressive left basically goes wrong by just pretending that their views get presumption--basically pretending that the past never happened and the status quo carries no weight. So, e.g., instead of making the case for (more) open borders, they just began pretending that controlling the border is evil, and began screaming that anyone who wanted to do so is racist. They basically skip over the part where we collectively say: x is the status quo; but here are reasons to think that y could be better; let's have a public discussion about the relative merits of x and y. Instead, the average American wakes up one morning to screaming mobs of lefties acting as if immigration laws were implemented yesterday by the Klan.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the GOP isn't currently a genuinely conservative party; it was gripped by its own species of radicalism. [Insert standard rant about Newt Gingrich here.]
Or, anyway, this is the way I'm thinking about it this morning.
Centrism. Rational discussion. Incremental change...and...in some cases...[gasp]...no change at all... The more radical your suggestion, the less certain and eager you ought to be about ramming it through. Unfortunately, we seem to find just the opposite.
What they need to do is stop with the constant revolution. Constant, radical, little-understood change is a blueprint for disaster. There's no reason that liberal goals need to be conjoined with spastic, disorienting, socially hazardous, implausible, poorly-thought-out lurches to the left--especially multiple ones at any given time, or in rapid succession. If Dems want more porous borders, then enforce current laws and policies and argue for loosening them up. Work for protections for sexual orientation--a reasonable idea--and try making the case for protections for "gender identity"--a very different and far less plausible idea. (An idea no one had even heard of ten years ago.)
It's making the case that the progressive left is awful at.
I currently think that the far progressive left basically goes wrong by just pretending that their views get presumption--basically pretending that the past never happened and the status quo carries no weight. So, e.g., instead of making the case for (more) open borders, they just began pretending that controlling the border is evil, and began screaming that anyone who wanted to do so is racist. They basically skip over the part where we collectively say: x is the status quo; but here are reasons to think that y could be better; let's have a public discussion about the relative merits of x and y. Instead, the average American wakes up one morning to screaming mobs of lefties acting as if immigration laws were implemented yesterday by the Klan.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the GOP isn't currently a genuinely conservative party; it was gripped by its own species of radicalism. [Insert standard rant about Newt Gingrich here.]
Or, anyway, this is the way I'm thinking about it this morning.
Centrism. Rational discussion. Incremental change...and...in some cases...[gasp]...no change at all... The more radical your suggestion, the less certain and eager you ought to be about ramming it through. Unfortunately, we seem to find just the opposite.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:00 AM
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