Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
That's the Democratic party brand, it's what they already do.
Hmm, they do a tremendous job of not promoting that aspect. On the national level it is hard to really shake the assertion that Democrats love to bring attention to Big Bills once they are in power and spend everything they have on these Big Bills. Both Obama and Clinton would have done better to spend their political capital on less controversial, efficiency driven improvements rather than harping on universal health care for the past 30 years. Even now there is no clear path to universal health care, assuming Biden gets everything he is promising. So what exactly have Dems done, cause as far as I can tell the Veterans are still struggling to get healthcare, the Post Office is broke, funding for research and development in some fields is not being expanded, and the IRS is still trying to move beyond computers older than me.

The Holy Grail of leftist ideology is really to create a sort of perpetual motion machine by empowering the "common person" to self-radicalize and self-organize, which grassroots we know by now was the engine of social democracy and civil rights around the world in the 20th century (as compared to top-down action alone). Neoliberals and technocrats in a meta-sense are perhaps too focused on what they might accomplish with dictation, but that is clearly a vulnerable strategy even when at its best (and when it's not at its best it reproduces many of the social flaws carried over by the agents, or just results in outright bad or damaging policy).
There are already plenty of radicalized socialists spending all their time talking theory over the internet, radicalizing other people. They never leave their room though, so there is a missing component beyond being part of a grassroots organization. Anyone can stand in a march with friends for a day. Some can march in the streets for a few weeks. Few actually carry out their lives as political agents, despite the strength of their opinions.



Culture war is a long-term move that began at least with the Birchers and patriarchal reactionary evangelicals in the 50s, make no mistake.
I don't think the situation we find ourselves in was part of anyone's Grand Plan. Evangelicals of the 1950s would have balked if you said they would be defending someone with the record of Donald Trump.

Anyway, socialists are gaining an increasing presence in city governments across the country today, so adjusting for local conditions I'm not sure how scared you ought to be of Republican op-eds. Even in Seattle, Amazon won the battle against the head tax in 2018 but in the subsequent election it lost the war and now an even higher tax is being imposed. If you really want a taste of power do the research on your target jurisdiction, the target office, and on what makes an effective political campaign.
Even slight degrees of public attention can change things, especially on the local level, even more especially for purple districts.
My understanding is that socialists continue to lose on national and state levels in primaries or in the general elections when compared to moderates and neoliberals. It's great if progress is made within cities, but those by definition are the easy pickings for a socialist candidate, once in the suburbs and rural areas they seem to fall apart although I can't explain why.