If we actually care about outcomes, then maybe we should use some of that vaunted intelligence to think about winning more.
"You're dumb and racist, so vote for us" is apparently not a winning message. And spending hundreds of millions on the same dumb media consulting firms that lose again and again, zero positive message besides "it's us or trump".. I could go on for days about how "smart" the democratic politicians are.
Pursuit of winning at the cost of values isn't a great path. We certainly see it in a bipartisan selection of politicians, but there's no reason intelligence should win out any more of less to propaganda or misinformation, regardless of which party it comes from, especially because it tends to be a lot easier to convince even inteligent people of an appealing lie than an ugly truth, again regardless of party affiliation.
As I said, these things are not constrained to one side or the other. Though Biden was a moderate, and overall there was more support for moderates in the aggregate than for the more extreme progressive views of Bernie. That could just have come down to a more cynical calculation about "electability" though.
Whomever's downvoting both of us should chill, first off.
Second off.. I mean Biden's basically center-right, and he does nothing for any of the values most loudly espoused by the democratic base. He'd have been fired from a FAANG company for the "You're not black" comment, but everyone just agreed to pretend it didn't happen instead because we were stuck with him at that point.
So you can't say it's about values instead of winning. The thing is, our values would win. 60-70% of the country supports medicare for all, most people would support a more redistributive tax code, most people don't like the idea of cops shooting their kid, it goes on and on. But the democratic professional class refuses to run on those values, again and again.
Do you ever see the Republicans telling the pro-life people to eat shit the way the Democrats consistently tell progressives? No, they make a deal that they'll fight for it, probably lose, but at least they'll fight, and they get votes for it.
And the coup de grace is that anyone who questions the democrats' commitment must not really be on our side. Probably a closet racist. It's really kind of genius if your goal is to maintain control of the party.
Yeah, I don't get the downvotes either. It's an honest discussion, but too many people upvote/downvote only based on agreement with the point of view. I'm perfectly happy to upvote a comment I disagree with if it is well thought out and improves the discussion in a thoughtful way. Conversely, I'll downvote someone I agree with if their comment is inflammatory.
Anyway, I'm done here, no energy left after going through these threads. I generally agree with your sentiment though, albeit not on everything.
Even though Clinton and Obama weren't saints - and I have limited respect for both of them - you are going to have a really hard time finding behaviour on that scale on the liberal side.
You're also going to find much less evidence of either threatened or actual violence.
Even BLM at its worst has never come close to the appalling record of right-wing violence in the US over the last couple of decades.
So that's why liberals "lose" - we're far less likely to feel comfortable with lying, cheating, bullying, violence, and intimidation. And for a substantial percentage of right-wing supporters those seem to be considered admirable moral features, not bugs.
Disagree? Provide evidence of general trends, not specifics.
Worth a thought.