General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How the extreme left gave us Nixon, Bush and now Trump [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)It is eight years later, obviously, but that doesn't equate to a swing in opinion against unions.
Please stop accusing me of thinking that everyone shares my views. I've never thought that. It's just that I don't accept that the things I support are hopelessly unpopular. You don't think that of the things you support, so why should I think it of myself?
In the early part of this century, same-sex marriage was overwhelmingly unpopular. That didn't stop the LGBTQ community fighting like hell for it . It didn't even stop that community from putting public pressure on John Kerry to come out in support of it during the fall 2004 campaign.
Even if you are right in implying that most people are to my right on nearly everything, what lesson should be taken from that?
Should I just give up on working for the causes I support?
Should no one in the party ever argue for supporting things that aren't already popular?
Should the party itself ONLY take progressive positions on issues when those views have majority support?
That could easily lead, in some years, to being conservative(or "centrist", which is largely the same thing) on nearly everything, as we were in the dead zone of the Nineties.
That wasn't the approach Hillary used in the primaries. She won by acknowledging that she needed to promise to go farther on things than she'd started out and she reached out to those who supported her main opponent. The problem was that all that was abandoned in the fall in favor of focusing on calling Trump out as a scumbag. Trump IS a scumbag, but it became instantly clear that the voters didn't care and that the "moderate Republican women in the suburbs" who were supposed to be won over by that did not exist.
Besides, even if that approach got us back into the White House and into majorities in the House and Senate, what good would winning by blurring the differences do? It would essentially mean promising to do nothing in office that mattered. It's not possible to be publicly anti-progressive and still do progressive things behind-the-scenes, for God's sakes.