Links - 13th July 2019 (2) (The Extremism of the Democrats in the US)

The Second Debate Went Badly for Democrats - "In a single evening, Harris endorsed abolishing private health insurance and offering taxpayer-funded health care to unauthorized immigrants, and opposed the deportation of unauthorized immigrants who have not committed criminal offenses. “A mother who pays a coyote to transport her child,” she began one sentence, but instead of warning against human trafficking, she ended by insisting that the mother and child be allowed to stay. Harris committed herself to a left-wing base-rallying strategy in ways she will not easily escape—in a party whose left-wing base is quite a tiny portion of America as a whole. The third and final weakness of the night was the unwillingness and inability of any of the candidates—except, quietly, Biden—to defend their party’s most important domestic reform since the Lyndon Johnson administration: Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act was passed when Democrats held a 60-seat majority in the Senate. If you believe it’s a shabby, pitiful, unworthy half measure, then other than magic wishing pills, there’s no strategy for you ever to enact anything you will regard as successful. And denouncing it in those terms is an indictment of the last president, the one who, to this day, remains a talismanic name among the voters these candidates most need to mobilize. Things may change by November 2020, but in the summer of 2019, polls show an American electorate that is more content with its own personal situation than at any time since the second Clinton administration. President Trump has not (yet) been able to capitalize on that satisfaction, because so many voters are repelled by him personally. But there is little appetite in this country for big radical reforms such as stripping people of their existing private-sector health insurance. There will be even less appetite when the next administration tries to finance that reform by raising taxes, as the candidates last night acknowledged they will have to do. Democrats won on Obamacare. They beat back almost a decade of Republican efforts to repeal it. But they won’t accept success as an answer, and so they won’t allow their party the moral and political rewards of success. They are competing for the support of the angry voters they read on Twitter—overlooking the many millions of people uniquely available to the non-incumbent party in what should be a pro-incumbent cycle."

Ocasio-Cortez Suggests Pelosi Is Targeting Her Because Pelosi Is Racist - "Pelosi has repeatedly mocked Ocasio-Cortez and the other three far-left freshmen House Democrats"

The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate - The New York Times - "Perhaps the most telling poll of the Democratic primary season hasn’t been about the Democratic primary at all — but about the fallout from a 35-year-old racist photo on a yearbook page. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia was pummeled on social media after the revelation, and virtually every Democratic presidential candidate demanded his resignation.Yet the majority of ordinary Democrats in Virginia said Mr. Northam should remain in office, according to a Washington Post/Schar School poll a week later. And black Democrats were likelier than white ones to say Mr. Northam should remain.Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate. The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.
Democrats who do not post political content to social media sites are more likely to …
Identify themselves as moderates or conservatives
Say political correctness is a problem in the U.S.
Say they don’t follow the news much
Be African-American...
recent polls show that a majority of Democrats would rather see the party become more moderate than move leftward, even as progressives clamor for a Green New Deal or Medicare for all.
Democrats who post political content on social media are more likely to ...
Have a college degree
Be white
Say they have become more liberal in their lifetime
Say they have attended a protest in the last year
Say they have donated to a political organization in the last year...
The candidates of the progressive left, whether Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speak with moral clarity. The strongest traditional liberal candidates, despite their pragmatic streak, speak with hopeful idealism, stemming from their relatively optimistic view of the country’s capacity to compromise, reform and change. Barack Obama took that tack in 2008, and Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker might hope to in 2020.In recent decades, most of the candidates who have found their core strength among the party’s ideologically consistent, left-liberal activist base have lost. Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean and Mr. Sanders all fell short against candidates of the party’s establishment, like Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. The establishment candidates won the nomination by counting on the rest of the party’s voters.The rest of the party is easy to miss. Not only is it less active on social media, but it is also under-represented in the well-educated, urban enclaves where journalists roam. It is under-represented in the Northern blue states and districts where most Democratic politicians win elections... it would also be a mistake to assume that outrage on social media means outrage throughout the broader electorate. And it would be a mistake to assume that more moderate Democrats are out of step with the party’s electorate"
Aka why Trump will win in 2020

Tim Murtaugh on Twitter - "Democrats running for president have officially lost it. Beto & Castro strongly imply that the Betsy Ross flag is a symbol of hatred. Do the rest of the Dems agree? Pictured here, of course, is the notorious flag prominently featured at President Obama's 2nd inauguration."

MATTHEWS: Republican slippery slope warnings bear out as Democrats target memorials to founding figures - "In the aftermath of the June 2015 mass murders of nine black churchgoers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., by a crazed racist white man who flew the Confederate flag as inspiration, a national debate raged on public displays of memorials related to the Confederacy... The slippery slope-warners were right. As Confederate reminders are disappearing from the public landscape with regularity and little fanfare, the left has indeed moved on to their next targets.The week before Nike’s decision, the San Francisco School Board voted to paint over an 83-year-old George Washington mural displayed at George Washington High School. In addition to Washington, the mural also depicts a dead Indian and black slaves. Even art historians on the left are upset over the move, which was made over fears that the images were triggering to students.Movements are also underway in other states to cover up or otherwise remove similar murals. Some have been vandalized. Just a few days after the San Francisco School Board’s vote, Virginia’s Charlottesville City Council voted to stop observing former President Thomas Jefferson’s birthday as a paid holiday. “Thomas Jefferson is the R. Kelly of the American Enlightenment,” said one University of Virginia professor.Jefferson was the university’s founder.Christopher Columbus, though not a founding father, is also a target of the left’s ire. “Columbus Day” is now “Indigenous Peoples Day” in many cities throughout the U.S. The late President George H.W. Bush is also not a founding father, but students at the historically black Hampton University and at least one Democratic Congressman want a recently unveiled statue of him removed.In a recent piece, my writing colleague Susie Moore made probably one of the best cases for leaving monuments and murals the way they are, arguing they should be used as teachable moments instead.“History isn’t utopian and historical figures, including our founding fathers, aren’t demi-gods. They were ‘men, no more no less.’ The current trend to willfully erase them and their deeds — both good and bad — by removing markers and symbols referencing them is probably well-intentioned in most instances, but so very ill-conceived. It lets the perfect be not just the enemy of the good but swallow it whole,” Moore wrote.She concluded by saying that we “should remember them. We should honor their accomplishments and learn from their mistakes.”"
So much for the slippery slope being a paranoid conservative myth

Obama’s DHS Secretary: Democrat Immigration Plans ‘Tantamount To Declaring Publicly That We Have Open Borders’ - "As Democrat presidential candidates declare they would decriminalize illegal immigration, former members of President Barack Obama’s administration — who have firsthand knowledge of the issue — are urging caution... “That is unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”Johnson also pushed back on Democrat outrage over detention centers and the notion that President Donald Trump is putting kids in “cages.” “Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages -- whatever you want to call them -- were not invented on January 2017," Johnson said, according to Fox News. He also said that the “cages” were created because of a mass influx of immigration for which the government was unprepared. He said the illegal immigrants would be held for up to 72 hours before being transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. “During that 72 hour period, when you have something that is a multiple -- like four times of what you're accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you've got to find places quickly to put kids," he said. He added that the alternative was releasing them to “the streets.”Johnson is not alone in this criticism of Democrats. At the end of June, Obama’s former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Thomas Homan, also defended Trump from claims that he was behind the cages. “During that 72 hour period, when you have something that is a multiple -- like four times of what you're accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you've got to find places quickly to put kids," he said. He added that the alternative was releasing them to “the streets.”Johnson is not alone in this criticism of Democrats. At the end of June, Obama’s former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Thomas Homan, also defended Trump from claims that he was behind the cages. “I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages. That facility was built under President Obama under (Homeland Security) Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built,” Homan said."

Every Democrat At The Debate Said They Would Extend Health Care To Undocumented Immigrants - "“All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited health care. How about taking care of American Citizens first!?” Trump tweeted.The support from these presidential candidates is a departure from current law"

Andrew Quackson on Twitter - "if Democrats want to give free healthcare to immigrants, why don't they deport them to Mexico where healthcare is guaranteed in the Mexican Constitution?"

The Insanity of Democrats Attacking Pete Buttigieg—for Not Being Gay Enough - "The fact that the press and political class are even taking Buttigieg’s candidacy seriously is a historic first. An openly gay candidate has never qualified for a presidential debate, let alone become president (the jury is still out on James Buchanan, but whatever his orientation, he wasn’t leading any Pride parades in 1857).Yet some liberal voices are now discounting Buttigieg’s sexual orientation (“still a white man”), or at least diminishing the historic discrimination gays have faced as compared with women and people of color (“most of the time gender and race are way heavier burdens than sexual orientation in the professional and political environment,” and “there was a time when it was illegal for us to marry interracially, women and POC could not even own property but a gay white man could”). For those critics, his race and gender negate the little credit they accord him for being gay. All of this seems like an attempt to write Buttigieg off as “just another white guy,” standing in the way of more diverse candidates. It’s the Oppression Olympics at its worst: In a battle to prove that one community is more discriminated against than another, we tear each other apart rather than unite in common cause. The arguments against Buttigieg fall roughly into four categories. The first is that Buttigieg acts too straight to have any gay cred... Buttigieg’s critics also allege that being gay isn’t important to him... There’s also the suggestion that being white and male trumps the fact that Buttigieg is gay... Mayor Pete has touched a chord with many Democrats because he’s an amazing candidate with a compelling personal story. He’s a millennial war veteran (who served in Afghanistan under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy), speaks seven languages, is a Rhodes Scholar, and has an almost Mr. Rogers-like demeanor that’s as calming as it is captivating. Maybe he’s so popular because he’s just that good"
The reality of intersectionality

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "The Slate author below analyzes his candidacy through an intersectional lens - race, gender, sexual preference, etc. She also weighs his relative purity in each identity category and how he compares to other candidates. It’s a bit weird to watch how she measures his relative membership in various identitarian tribes with little attention paid to public policy and leadership style"

Democrats Tolerated Anti-Semitism, and Now They Can’t Control It - "Quite unlike the GOP’s experience, though, Democrats have encountered fierce resistance to this assault on the bigotry that lingers within their ranks... A watered-down resolution condemning anti-Jewish prejudice within the Congress was apparently the only thing that could still pass the House with united Democratic support. But even this failed to satisfy Omar’s progressive allies. Following what was described as a bitter internal debate, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer revealed that the resolution had been put on hold indefinitely... Liberal partisans know exactly what Democrats are doing here. Indeed, they explained why generic condemnations of hatred in the face of discrete episodes of bigotry entirely missed the point amid the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. “All lives matter,” was the response from those who were discomfited by the movement’s focus on excessive uses of force by police against African-Americans. Of course, all lives do matter, those on the left observed, but to insist upon such language in the face of specific episodes of bias targeting distinct demographics is obtuse. The effort isn’t to restore common bonds, but to diminish the validity of the Black Lives Matter movement’s grievance. Today, as Democratic House leadership calculates precisely how forcefully to condemn anti-Semitic sentiments within its ranks without alienating anti-Semites, a full-scale rebellion is brewing. Rep. Rashida Tlaib called the effort to condemn anti-Semitism “unprecedented” and questioned Pelosi’s judgment. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted that Pelosi’s resolution was “hurtful” and that there should be similar votes condemning all manner of bigotries ranging from xenophobia, to homophobia, to “anti-blackness.” Pelosi is a “typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men,” wrote Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour. These are not nobodies. These are core figures in the Democratic coalition, individuals who are now or were only recently some of the party’s most visible new faces. It isn’t just the activist wing that has effectively sided with Omar in this fight. The New York Times claimed that Omar’s attack on the Israeli lobbying group AIPAC raised important questions about the influence Zionists and Jews wield. The Washington Post suggested that Pelosi would invite a prolonged internecine debate over America’s policy toward Israel by unequivocally condemning anti-Jewish bigotry. These are not fringe institutions expressing the concerns of a marginal constituency. It was only one month ago that the Democratic Party was united in disgust after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam admitted to appearing in photographs as a younger man in blackface"

Democrats' 'Sudden' Hard-Left Turn Has Been Years In The Making - "Sure, today's Democrats and their allies in the big media talk about the "extreme right" and "ultra right" Republican Party. They call rank and file Republicans racists and nazis.But, as numerous studies and polls confirm, it's the Democratic Party that has moved far left — while the Republican Party has more or less remained where it was... Pew's methodology was simple. Starting in 1994, they asked Democrats and Republicans where they stood on 10 key issues, ranging from welfare and racial discrimination, to defense and immigration.The results were stark and unequivocal.As we reported in October of 2017, "The results show that while the Republican center moved only slightly to the right over the past 23 years, the center of the Democratic part shifted far to the left."Likewise, a 2015 academic study by scholars at the University of Oregon, Princeton University and the University of Houston, found that state Democratic parties since the late 1990s have "become more liberal." But the Republicans, again, haven't moved ideologically much at all.There is a deeper history to this, of course. In 1972, the Democratic Convention was hijacked by far-left supporters and delegates for progressive peace candidate George McGovern. Since then, the Democratic Party has been drifting more or less continually to the left... Ronald Reagan, himself once a proud Democrat, said it best: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.""

What the Midterms Showed About Progressive Candidates - "Almost every candidate in whom Democrats at the national level invested emotional energy—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Stacey Abrams in Georgia—appears to have lost. Almost every detested Republican appears to have survived: Devin Nunes, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, even Duncan Hunter, a California Republican under indictment... There is no progressive majority in America. There is no progressive plurality in America. And there certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in America... In past “flip the House” elections—2010, 2006, 1994—the party of the president suffered large-to-calamitous drops in vote total as compared with the previous presidential election... In 2018, however, Republicans dropped only 20 percent of their votes cast as compared with 2016"

Progressivism Is Radicalizing the Democratic Party - "For most of his career, Sanders—who identified as an independent but who caucused with Democrats—was treated like a curiosity and even a bit of a crazy uncle by Democrats, who considered the label socialist to be a smear.No more.The most prominent socialist in America, Sanders has gained a following... Among the freshman class of House Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—now the second-most-famous democratic socialist in America—is the unquestioned star among the base. According to Dan Balz of The Washington Post, Ocasio-Cortez is “the titular leader of a progressive grass-roots movement pushing the party to the left.” (The mere mention of her name elicits spontaneous applause on programs like The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.)Another prominent member of the freshman class of House Democrats, Ilhan Omar, recently dismissed former President Barack Obama—who not that long ago defined the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—as too right-wing... On every front, the Democratic Party is moving left, and the power of the left can be seen in the fact that even Democrats who oppose some of these policies are wary of attacking them. When it comes to challenging the progressive wing, Democratic candidates act as if they are walking on eggshells... This embrace of radical progressivism and its colossal price tag is almost certainly going to hurt Democrats politically—most of their gains in 2018 were in suburban districts, among voters who tend to recoil at radicalism of any kind—and it could be politically disastrous... The trend is toward growing hostility to free markets and capitalism, in many cases to the point of barely contained contempt for it and for the wealthy... Democrats want to focus their attention on the flaws and corruptions of Donald Trump, and they have a lot to work with. But you won’t become a saint through other people’s sins, Anton Chekhov said, and the Democratic Party will not become a responsible governing party because of the faults of President Trump."

Far-left candidates did poorly in the Democratic primaries - The centre can hold - "the party has moved leftward a bit. The same Pew Research Centre study found that 28% of partisans described themselves as liberal in 2000, compared with 46% in 2017. The candidates have moved, too. The Economist’s analysis of a measure of candidate ideology, developed by Adam Bonica of Stanford University, finds that the average Democratic primary-winner in 2018 is indeed more liberal than in 2016 (see chart). Democratic candidates are also more scattered over the ideological spectrum than they have been in recent years. A higher share are either extremely liberal or atypically moderate compared with previous cycles. Data from Third Way, a centre-left think-tank, show that candidates endorsed by the progressive groups Our Revolution and Justice Democrats won their primaries no more than 37% of the time. Most of those victories came in places Republicans are almost certain to win. On the other hand, candidates belonging to the moderate New Democrat Coalition or those endorsed by the party establishment won 71 of their 78 primaries. Jim Kessler of Third Way says that voters were looking for fresh faces, not necessarily for liberal ones. A statistical analysis of Mr Bonica’s ideological scores reveals that the leftward drift of the Democratic Party has not resulted in primary voters placing much weight on left-wing ideology. Voters were more inclined to reward women, incumbents and candidates who seemed a good fit for their districts."

Here’s Why Some Progressives Are Tearing Each Other Apart - "If the conservative Ancestral Story is anchored in ancient theologies like those in the Bible and Quran, and the Social Liberal Story is rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, the Structural Oppression Story is grounded in a neo-Marxist analysis of society known as Critical Theory, most often applied as Critical Race Theory or Critical Gender Theory...
Has a questionable accusation of sexual harassment cost a man his job or reputation? Remember how many others got away with it.
When each of us is seen as representative of a group of people, restitution and retribution don’t necessarily have to accrue to the actual victims or oppressors. Ideally, yes. But when that is not possible, another member of their tribe may do. Like conservative Christians, adherents of oppression narrative sometimes believe—or act as if—one man can atone for the sins of another... Neither religious faith nor subjective experience is accountable. Both are untouchable from the standpoint of the scientific method, which—because humans are so prone to confirmatory thinking—has been called “what we know about how not to fool ourselves.” In the absence of a shared agreement about epistemology—how we decide what’s real—we have no means of converging on a shared set of facts."
Maybe if those opposing modern liberalism called it Critical Theory instead of Cultural Marxism it would be harder for liberals to dismiss them. But the lack of the M word would mobilise fewer people

Obama’s Speech on the State of American Democracy: Full Text - "sometimes I get into arguments with progressive friends about what the current political movement requires. There are well-meaning folks, passionate about social justice, who think that things have gotten so bad and the lines so starkly drawn that we have to fight fire with fire... eroding our civic institutions, and our civic trusts, and making people angrier, and yelling at each other, and making people cynical about government, that always works better for those who don’t believe in the power of collective action... we believe that in order to move this country forward, to actually solve problems and make people’s lives better, we need a well-functioning government. We need our civic institutions to work. We need cooperation among people of different political persuasions. And to make that work, we have to restore our faith in democracy. You have to bring people together, not tear them apart. We need majorities in Congress and state legislatures who are serious about governing and want to bring about real change and improvements in people’s lives. And we won’t win people over by calling them names or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist or sexist or homophobic. When I say bring people together, I mean all of our people. This whole notion that has sprung up recently about Democrats need to choose between trying to appeal to white working-class voters or voters of color and women and LGBT Americans, that’s nonsense. I don’t buy that. I got votes from every demographic. We won because we reached out to everybody and competing everywhere and by fighting for every vote, and that’s what we’ve got to do in this election and every election after that. And we can’t do that if we immediately disregard what others have to say from the start, because they are not like us, because they are white or they’re black or a man or a woman, or they’re gay or they’re straight. If we think that somehow there is no way they can understand how I’m feeling, and therefore don’t have any standing to speak on certain matters, because we’re only defined by certain characteristics. That doesn’t work if you want a healthy democracy. We can’t do that if we traffic in absolutes when it comes to policy."
Antifa can go after Obama next