If you mean betraying minority rights, no, that's not something Democrats should consider doing. But they have to be better at using their own strong framing and not parroting Republican framing.
Right. That's the conundrum. FDR held his coalition by appeasing Southern segregationists. If progressives don't make those kinds of cultural bargains, they lose power to those who will. It's why I don't see much hope for any kind of durable progressive governance. The culture is changing too quickly to avoid giving the bad guys the ammunition needed to quickly blow apart coalitions. That and I just don't see where the money's gonna come from to finance durable progressive governance with so much of the population aging out of their taxpaying years.
As long as the U.S. dollar remains the primary world currency, money can be borrowed for that purpose, but once it's dropped, the U.S. is likely to be in deep trouble. And I agree that the capacity of numerous American voters to vote for criminal, incompetent racist extremists shows that expecting durable progressive governance in this country is probably a lost cause. They'll vote for progressives when Republicans preside over economic disasters they don't give them a pass for like Trump's deadly mishandling of COVID, but they won't do so consistently because too many of them are ignorant, stupid, bigoted, or believe in demonstrably false religions (by which I mean they refuse to accept scientific facts in favor of religious fantasies, not things like believing in an eventual apocalypse, Second Coming, etc.) and ministers and therefore are easy prey for conspiracy lies and con men.
A democratic tea party does need to happen, not based on ideological purity tests but between fighters vs do-nothing Democrats.
They'd have to avoid getting caught up in the next iterations of the culture war to have any chance of pulling it off, and I don't like their chances.
If you mean betraying minority rights, no, that's not something Democrats should consider doing. But they have to be better at using their own strong framing and not parroting Republican framing.
Right. That's the conundrum. FDR held his coalition by appeasing Southern segregationists. If progressives don't make those kinds of cultural bargains, they lose power to those who will. It's why I don't see much hope for any kind of durable progressive governance. The culture is changing too quickly to avoid giving the bad guys the ammunition needed to quickly blow apart coalitions. That and I just don't see where the money's gonna come from to finance durable progressive governance with so much of the population aging out of their taxpaying years.
As long as the U.S. dollar remains the primary world currency, money can be borrowed for that purpose, but once it's dropped, the U.S. is likely to be in deep trouble. And I agree that the capacity of numerous American voters to vote for criminal, incompetent racist extremists shows that expecting durable progressive governance in this country is probably a lost cause. They'll vote for progressives when Republicans preside over economic disasters they don't give them a pass for like Trump's deadly mishandling of COVID, but they won't do so consistently because too many of them are ignorant, stupid, bigoted, or believe in demonstrably false religions (by which I mean they refuse to accept scientific facts in favor of religious fantasies, not things like believing in an eventual apocalypse, Second Coming, etc.) and ministers and therefore are easy prey for conspiracy lies and con men.