- Joined
- Feb 25, 2012
- Messages
- 19,763
- Reaction score
- 4
It's hilarious to see the right wing claim she is unelectable because she is too leftist when she aligns with centrists like Clinton and Booker on all the key issues. All because they can't let go of the Pocahontas thing. And her efforts to counter it basically ensure she loses:Agree. Gtfo with that identity politics nonsense. It's reductionist, way too divise and most important it's not needed at all. Actually, it's counter productive because it turns a large amount of voters off.
Why can't the progressives just stand behind Sanders? He's almost entirely responsible for giving the progressive wing a platform. Money out politics, medicare for all, tuition free college, raising minimum wage, it was him that made those mainstream talking points.
At Slate, Jess Zimmerman wrote an excellent piece which essentially argued that Democrats have been cast as the “feminine” party in America, that “feminine” is seen as weak, and that it has defined how men and women on the left are allowed to behave, particularly in terms of anger. (I'm over-simplifying—read the whole piece.) If we accept that paradigm, what Warren is trying to do in this video is to assert her masculine bona fides in an attempt to woo the country's middle-right.
In doing so, she demonstrates a toxic Democratic mindset—one that believes you can Change Minds among moderate Republicans if only you can toe that fine line between “tough” and “civil.” That you can appeal to the better angels of conservative nature, and that, in fact, the masculine center-right is the group most worthy of your attention, rather than the great numbers of non-voters, progressives, and working poor that are yearning for representation from a party that long ago left them behind.
It's a pathetic video, actually, because it's a furtive act of selling out to mainstream wisdom, mainstream culture, and the mythical American middle. Needless to say, adopting this mindset necessarily means adopting centrist policy at the expense of the people, which is how the Democrats forfeited their working class base in the first place. It's the epitome of not learning a damn thing.
Worse, just like every other mealy-mouthed Democratic politician who has tried it, it WILL NOT WORK.
This is the cardinal sin of Warren's whole gambit: She engaged with a group of people who are acting in bad faith. The voters who support them are acting in bad faith. They don't care about the truth of her Native American ancestry—they only want to make her defensive, they only want to rattle her, and they only want power. You cannot “out-fact” them, because the fundamental drive behind their bad faith is not based in logic or reason, but in a visceral urge to abuse, humiliate, and dominate.