Do any Democrats still think neoliberalism is a winning strategy?

It was such a disaster of a plan. But I never bought into neoliberalism.

I don’t know. Leftists are always telling me the problem is that the Democrats are too moderate but Trump has managed to convince a large part of the nation that Biden is a radical socialist (even though he’s far from it). If the Democratic Party actually full-on embraced “democratic socialism”, is that going to attract more voters? It seems fear of socialism is driving a lot of Trump votes.

^ Except nothing supports your statements.

Remember the mythical “never-Trump Republicans” that Biden was targeting? Remember how everyone here was convinced that this is the way to go….again? Well, surprise – Trump increased his support among Republicans this time.

Liberals were concerned that if there was a candidate like Sanders, who is not a socialist but uses the term Democratic Socialism rather than running away from it, he would lose because he would be labeled a socialist. When we reminded everyone that there was a guy named Obama who was also labeled a socialist, people seemed disinterested. Their argument was that it was important to run a candidate that was the public face of anti-socialism and capitalism (Biden) to run.

As soon as the Dems installed Biden as the candidate, he was immediately labeled with “socialist”. Sure, there are many Republicans who aren’t rich, actually work, and have no idea what socialism is other than it’s something bad that conservative media tell them. But you’re not going to win those people over by running a literal corporate anti-socialist puppet. Because he was still a “socialist”.

What we are seeing is exactly what the left has been warning their liberal friends about….again (christ, 2016 never happened apparently). During the largest social movement to bubble up in this country in decades (BLM), the Dems elect the guy who crafted the crime bill, which destroyed black lives for decades. And for vp, they decided it would be great to put in the “top cop” of California – a woman who had no black support.

And the whole Dem effort to stop Sanders (thanks Obama), was an effort to appease donors by denying people healthcare. They also had garbage outreach to non-white Latinx people, who had overwhelmingly supported Sanders during the primary. Instead they again just took their vote for granted. And what happened? Trump’s support for every demographic other than white men increased.

So, are we going to blame voters again – this time, black and latinx voters in particular – just because they are not a homogenous entity, and they are not to be taken for granted? Or do you think it would have been worthwhile reaching out to these populations and actually offering something?

The “socialism” tag should be embraced, like Sanders has done. Whenever Sanders had been asked about it, he would define what socialism meant to him. While it doesn’t really meet any criteria for being “socialist”, it did do two things: 1) It gave him a chance to take back a term from disingenuous critics by connecting it to popular programs and policies, and 2) it helps take away a word that is used to demonize someone, despite not a single person knowing what it means.

@Demosthenes: “If the Democratic Party actually full-on embraced “democratic socialism”, is that going to attract more voters?”

They’re not going to. But they could support programs that have had the “socialism” label slapped on them, like M4A. This is an indisputable electoral winner. There is just no more debating this.

But remember – the Dems did not want to win with popular programs like M4A. They would rather lose. But they were hoping to get by with an anti-healthcare, imperialist, pro-wall street, “nothing will fundamentally change”, women and girl-fondling, possible rapist with severe cognitive decline so that they could satisfy their donors and avoid the slightest shift left. The Dems are objectively a right-wing party.

I see memes on FB about Biden being for opening up the borders to illegals and being in favor of baby killing. Sounds so dramatic.

I don’t think AOC is where the bulk of the party is. Maybe young people are more in line with her, I don’t know, She certainly is part of the Democratic Party, even though she has said she would be a different party if our system was different.

I think the majority of the country is socially liberal, but still fiscally moderate or conservative, so I think hitting that spot is the best way to go.

We have not had a politician in years who talks about the economic health of the country. They talk about the individual’s pocket, they talk about social programs, but not what balancing our budget will mean for America in terms of power and autonomy. Strong fiscal policy should give us a lot of the social programs liberals want, along with conservatives feeling safe the country is not going to the communists.

If somehow the country can get off of the topic of abortion it would change everything.

@JLeslie ”...fiscally moderate or conservative…”

What do you mean by this? Is it fiscally conservative to pursue tax cuts that disproportionately benefit billionaires? Is it fiscally conservative to spend more on our military than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the UK, Japan, South Korea and Brazil…COMBINED? Is it fiscally conservative to subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $10–50 billion every year? Is Reagonomics “fiscally conservative?” The idea was considered so laughably radical and illogical at the time that conservatives like Bush Sr. called it “Voodoo Economics.” I’m just trying to understand how you define the term, because I think it’s often used to describe very non-conservative fiscal ideas that Republicans seem to support.

A company that stopped investing in R&D and just took that money and cashed it out as dividends for shareholders instead would be considered radical. The fiscally conservative approach would be to maintain R&D budgets and invest in future opportunities.

”...but still fiscally moderate or conservative.”

The problem with that line of thinking is it hasn’t worked since 1992. Obama started to make a case for a radical restructuring of the economy as part of the efforts to fix things after the Bush debacle, but he was thwarted by the Tea Party faction and the loss of Congress. And then he reverted back to Clintonian policies.

While I will still prefer that Nancy Pelosi stay as Speaker, I hope she realizes she needs AOC and other new voices to take on leadership of the Democratic caucus.

Tuesday night , when I was expressing dismay that there was no “blue wave”, my 25 year old son who studied Public Policy at UC Berkeley said, “what did you expect with Joe Biden as the candidate?”

Of course they do. They will try to lay the blame somewhere else, anywhere but the fact that if you change your policies to appeal to right wing voters (instead of trying to convince those of your existing policies), you will lose voters on the left, while those right wing voters will not budge, because they are already happy where they are.

@Demosthenes Has he really convinced them of that, though? Labeling someone is not the same as convincing people that the label should stick. The Democratic Party isn’t worried about their candidates being called socialists. They’re worried about people believing it. By picking someone like Biden, they’re hoping to keep the number of people who believe he’s a radical socialist limited to those who were already going to believe it no matter what.

The number of people who were already going to believe it no matter what gets bigger the more polarized the electorate is. And since the electorate is pretty polarized, they’re fighting over an increasingly small number of “independents.” So the strategy is probably not one that has huge returns. But in fairness, it does seem to have worked. Independents largely disregarded the Trump campaign’s attempts to label Biden a socialist. They just don’t seem to be the prize that all the pundits insist they are.

@gorillapaws “Is it fiscally conservative to pursue tax cuts that disproportionately benefit billionaires?”

Of course it is, as are all of the other things you mentioned. Fiscally conservative ≠ fiscally responsible.

@Irukandji ”...they’re fighting over an increasingly small number of “independents.””

I think you might be making the error of thinking that independents are in the middle between left and right.

While I agree that “Fiscally conservative ≠ fiscally responsible.” the word “Conservative” does have a rather specific meaning. A conservative is one who conserves things. That the antithesis of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars on the millitary budget, slashing tax revenues and partying it up like Hunter Biden on a coke binge. I realize that it’s been redefined by the right, but I was trying to understand what sense of the word @JLeslie intended.

@gorillapaws You mean like Donald Trump Jr on a coke binge.

There hasn’t been a “fiscally responsible” Republican in almost 30 years. Bush/Cheney threw that out the window.

@JLeslie

A majority of Americans support universal healthcare.

@zenvelo “You mean like Donald Trump Jr on a coke binge.”

Yes. Also like that.

@gorillapaws The thing that is obvious to you is that neither party is what it professes to be. But the fact that they are both primarily engaged in the self aggrandizement of the politicians involved means that they must both insure the lucrative rewards (to themselves) through maintaining the status quo around where the money goes. In view of this, it is more than understandable that the Democrats are more adept and sophisticated at resisting pressure for reform from the left than the conservatives will ever be in restraining the wing nuts. As you keep hammering, there is in truth no hope of equity from the present setup. And the results of this current election demonstrate just how hopeless things have become. The very idea that after its 4 year run, the Trump show leaves half its audience unable to distinguish the lesser of the 2 evils is proof enough for me that it’s hopeless. No point in trying to convince the suckers of their plight. As a matter of self defense before it all topples in ruin, the smart move is to grab what you can and join in their exploitation.

@rockfan So do I.

@gorillapaws I mean fiscally responsible more than anything.

I think attracting business matters, which maybe sounds politically conservative to some people, but I am not saying loopholes that allow corporations to get away with paying no taxes.

I think we should be requiring large corporations to hold funds for emergencies. I think the government should be running with a kitty of emergency funds for natural disasters including pandemics.

I think if we are going to think about college for everyone let’s make sure we can actually pay for it, and most of all let’s make sure we aren’t being gouged for it. I hear Democrats talking about paying for a lot of social services and I don’t hear enough plans about how they will lower the costs or if they analyzed if costs are unreasonably high. I hate the answer, “go to community college.” I went to community college, I don’t think there is any problem with it, except for young adults who want to go to a university and can’t because of money. If they have the academic acumen I want them to be able to go to the university.

I could go on, but I need to take care of a computer problem that I think is going to screw up my day. I’ll just end with, do you think AOC will balance the budget if she’s the next president?

@gorillapaws Kind of you to assume my meaning rather than ask, but I never said that “independents” are in the middle (nor that they are truly independent). There’s a reason I put the word in quotation marks. And it’s a mistake to use a simplistic dictionary definition to characterize a political label chosen for marketing purposes.

I would think that “independents” are people “in the middle”, people to the extreme right, and people to the actual left. Considering how close the parties actually are politically, the amount of people in “the middle” I would consider vanishingly small.

@Irukandji I intended no disrespect. Notice I phrased it as “I think you might…” indicating that I was unsure if my assumption was accurate? You did say that they were “fighting over” them which would lead one to believe that they were “up for grabs” from either side (or at least that both sides believed them to be up for grabs). Apologies if I offended you or was unclear. That was not my intention.

Personally, I think it’s hard to gauge. The massive problem we have with this nation is everybody is out for themselves and what they want. We have at least 4 generations of different thinking. Dems pretty much are either independent thinkers,(nobody tells me what to do or not do) or progressives, I’m for building the nation and making money,, or Republican-lite (I’m a conservative and just want everyone to get along) and then liberal( my way or the highway).
Republicans were straight-up conservative and then split to the Tea party (Nation is too black and filled with too many immigrants and gay people) and then became the Trump party.(We hate everyone, even our own poor and sick and elderly that we feel make our taxes too hight) . Now it’s pretty much Tump party or republican lite (I’m a Christian so I must stay republican to save the babies) . The true conservative party doesn’t exist. But I will say the Republican party is easier to control with religion. That is the only thing that is keeping them from fracturing to far. The Democratic party is somehow holding on despite being fractured an not really being unified under one banner.

So all I can say is something I learned as a child. You can’t make everybody happy and yet it seems that is what everybody expects from their party. It is the one sad thing I find about my party and it slows down progression when you have to constantly fight even your own party for everything. The standard that is held for a Dem is different. Dems want their representative to capitulate to all demands. Not possible. Somebody will be pissed.
Republicans are, we get to keep the money we make and save babies and hate everyone els. Cool.
So to answer your question I don’t think it’s possible. I’m praying though we call all unite under one banner. One desire that outweighs the rest. Maybe global warming will do it but I don’t see that happening before that gets out of hand. By then we may have no government.
The American experiment I feel will fail. People are too hard wired to hate different.

@gorillapaws Just curious, do you think Florida matters much for strategy? Or, you’re fine ignoring that state and going after other ones for the win? Florida will likely be out for at least 8 years, it will go for Republican candidates, if you run Bernie and AOC type candidates. Know that Florida went for Trump, but passed by over 60% an amendment to grow the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 with incremental increases. If I remember correctly $10 an hour starts in 2021, and it goes up every year.

The Midwest seems difficult to me too honestly, not just Florida.

If Biden wins we have 4 years to convince Republicans who voted for Democrats that they should stay blue.

On MSNBC today they are pushing hard to stop with the socialist talk in America. Basically, what I have been saying for 4 years. Joe and Mika know Florida like I do, but they are picking up on a Washington Post article where Representative Abigail Spanberger of VA threw a little bit of fit telling Democrats to stop saying Socialism or we will get decimated in 2022.

I know you might not care about the Democrats getting decimated, but Democrats are your best chance of moving the US more towards policies you want than the Republicans.

@JLeslie: “If Biden wins we have 4 years to convince Republicans who voted for Democrats that they should stay blue.”

This does not exist. Trump increased his support among Republicans in 2020. Stop the (intentional) myth of the “never-trump Republican”. And more importantly, when a party punches left and reaches out to the right, it shows exactly what it is.

The Democratic party is the firewall that keeps popular programs and ideas from getting enacted. Not the Republican party. It’s also worth noting that the Republican and Democratic parties can’t exist without the other.

@JLeslie: “On MSNBC today…”

You can stop right there. They are the fiercest anti-left and pro-corporate voice in the media. It makes sense that you have these ideas if you are watching this.

And for the love of Pete, do you happen to remember a socialist named Barack Obama who won FL twice? Running from the term “socialist” is immoral and electorally a dead end.

Christ, Bernie was absolutely wrong. You cannot reform the Dem party by infiltrating it and saving it. It’s unfixable. But there is no disputing the fact that if Bernie Sanders had been the head of the Dem ticket in 2016 and 2020, he would have won in a landslide. The fact that I have to explain this in 2020 is terrifying. Put away the tv and read.

The very term neoliberal is a red herring. The fact is that the Republican Party has been tracking more and more conservative since the 1980’s, so much so that a centrist Democrat can be depicted as being a radical leftist. Believe it or not there was a time when you could hear a person described as a “Liberal Republican” or a “Conservative Democrat”.

I think that if you were to ask 100 random democrats off the street 98 of them would have no idea what neoliberalism means.

@hmmmmmm Ok, well, I personally have Republican friends who voted for Biden, and some of them the complete ticket. I know there isn’t a huge number of those people, but they definitely exist.

Bernie would have LOST Florida no question. Where would he have won? California? Hillary won California. New York? NH? VT? You think he would have won in Michigan? PA?

^ Exactly. They exist in fewer numbers than we are told exist. And more importantly, the few Republicans that voted for Biden was offset by a larger number of Republicans that voted for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016. He strengthened his Republican vote.

Also, like I said – the effort to appeal to these couple of people rather than the majority of the voters in this country is immoral and reason enough for the Dem party to not exist.

EDIT: I see you edited your comment to include confusion about Bernie again. I’m not going to continue this with you.

@hmmmmmm Both teams came out in larger numbers this time. People are dragging each other out to the polls and helping people order ballots.

Edit: I see you don’t want to continue. Sounds good.

Pre-election: We hate Biden, we will never vote for him, and we will convince as many people as we can not vote for him, as well.

Post-election: See, no one voted for Biden. My rhetoric before the election was correct.

@JLeslie I actually have a bunch of Republican friends who jumped ship to Biden. My brother in law is a hardcore Republican who has never vote for a Democrat in his life and he voted for Biden. Of course I live in California where it didn’t matter.

Someone’s not fond of systemic analysis – and proud of it.

@Caravanfan I have Michigan friends where it really mattered. Some of them voted Democrat down the entire ticket, which surprised me. I also have Florida friends, which matters, but it was not enough to make Florida blue obviously.

Kansas was leading blue for about 10 minutes on Tuesday.

My daughter is a politically active sophomore at UCLA, and she was heavily involved with Biden reelection efforts. I asked her how she felt about neoliberalism and she agrees with Hm and Gorilla. Her motivation was to get Trump out but she isn’t as skeptical as I am of governmental spending. We didn’t get into tariffs as it was a text conversation but from prior discussions she is skeptical of the utility of trade barriers.

Now she is in a liberal college bubble in a liberal state. I would be hesitant to generalize her feeling to the general young person population given how 50/50 this election is.

Good question though.

@JLeslie “I think attracting business matters, which maybe sounds politically conservative to some people, but I am not saying loopholes that allow corporations to get away with paying no taxes.”

Why do businesses need to be “attracted?” That’s a very new approach to the role of government and business in US history. Generally speaking, businesses go somewhere because they want to make money selling products and/or providing services. It used to be the other way around, where businesses would court local communities to have access to their markets and labor pools. Take a pause and think about what a profound shift in power that is from how things operated historically.

@JLeslie “I think we should be requiring large corporations to hold funds for emergencies. I think the government should be running with a kitty of emergency funds for natural disasters including pandemics.”

I could see something like an SEC rule that a company cannot issue stock buybacks, pay dividends or bonus executives if it doesn’t have x percent of the previous year’s revenue securely held in reserve capital and reimburses the government for the total expenses paid out to any of their anonymized employees (Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, etc.). I can’t see either party supporting a fiscally conservative and commonsense policy like that though. Because let’s be real, this has never been about sound fiscal or even pro-business policy, it’s always been about payouts to donors (from both parties).

As for the US holding such a reserve, I think it’s an excellent goal for the next 100+ years, but in the short-medium term we need to deal with much more immediate concerns like unwinding the damage caused by the Boomers (generational opportunity/wealth gaps, crushing debt, decades of neglecting the infrastructure, avoiding action on the climate crisis, concentration of wealth and power instead of a more competitive corporate landscape).

@JLeslie “I think if we are going to think about college for everyone let’s make sure we can actually pay for it, and most of all let’s make sure we aren’t being gouged for it…

We can’t afford to NOT pay for it. Either we’re going to have a generation of Americans that are so deeply in debt that they cannot ever begin participating meaningfully in the economy through no fault of their own, or we’re going to recognize that tuition free college makes as much sense as tuition free K-12 education. It’s not an expense, it’s an investment. The ROI from the GI Bill was something like a 700% return in the US economy. It turns out that investing in higher education for Americans pays out a lot. Nobody wants tax dollars spent frivolously, but let’s be real, politicians (on both sides) are writing enormous checks for military spending, corporate bailouts and in tax giveaways designed to be pro business. Do we really expect a 700% ROI from those other investments?

@JLeslie ”...do you think AOC will balance the budget if she’s the next president?”

Absolutely not, nor should she. If she were to implement austerity during such a period of generational crisis? It would be a really dumb fiscal strategy. We need to invest in our millennial generation or they’re not going to be able to keep the economy growing enough to pay down the debt left for them by Regan and the boomers, let alone tackle climate too. The future of our country’s middle class is looking bleak. Either we finance the necessary investments to correct these core structural flaws to the economy, or we ignore them and pursue austerity (which is going to end up costing more in the long run). Ask Kodak’s Antonio Pérez if saving money by not investing in the future was a good plan overall?

As for Flordia, I think it’s a trap. The policies you have to push to try to win an aging-out population blended with some pretty looney-toons right wing extremist politics from the younger population is incoherent and fundamentally incompatible with any kind of message that would appeal to people in swing states. Look at the governors that Florida voters have elected over the years: Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis. If you craft your policies to please an electorate who elects those assholes, then you’re pretty fucked in nearly every other state.

Anyways, my intention wasn’t so much to delve into each and every policy, but to explore whether people think the neoliberal, moderate-road path is still the best strategy for defeating the Republican party in all branches on the aggregate and preventing more Trumps in the future (something all of us on the left would like to see).

@Caravanfan “I think that if you were to ask 100 random democrats off the street 98 of them would have no idea what neoliberalism means.”

I’m certain you’re correct, but I’m confident that they’ll recognize the policies of neoliberalism (regardless of the political jargon), things like “globalism,” and “access” to healthcare (if you can afford it), bowing to big pharma, austerity, balanced budgets, incrementalism, opposing minimum wage increases, bailouts for reckless companies, bonuses for the executives who crashed the economy and took bailouts, employing lobbyists in the administration, cheering on fracking, parties in the Hamptons, freezers full of ice cream, cozying up to big tech, abandoning support for unions, not encouraging exploited workers to unionize (like Amazon, Wal-mart.) etc.

This is an interesting graph. The more conservative the Democrat was the more poorly they did in swing districts as a general trend.