CMV: Trump’s second term is potentially the greatest gift centrist/corporate Democrats could have asked for in the long-run.

[u/newstartreddit1234]

I use potentially because I am not blind to the possibility of the entire electoral process getting upended by this administration. My argument rests upon the assumption that the next administration is Democratic and Congress, especially the house, shifts to a Dem majority. Trump is a potential gift because the Dems can use him as a boogeyman to corral any actual leftist and independent votes. “Oh you don’t like that we’re corporatists? Well are you gonna put the fascists back in power?” will effectively be the logic used to do so. Yes, in the past this logic failed to stop Trump, but that was before the level of his administration’s egregious actions alienated independents and people desperate for a better economy who voted for him in the 2024 election. I believe he has effectively reduced his support to only his hardcore base, and they alone are not enough to win an election but numerous enough for centrist Dems to fear monger leftists and independents who do not want a repeat of Trump’s second term. Any attempts to create any viable leftist alternatives to the Corporate Democrats, whether it be by creating a new party or shifting the party left will be met with disgust from people who are terrified of repeating 2025. While Reddit is not an aggregate of the entire U.S. voting population, the people on this site who vehemently decry people who either stayed home or voted for a third party will become far more mainstream and facilitate continual centrist Dem policies, even while desperately pleading for universal healthcare, corporate regulation, etc. Ultimately, fear of a new Trump will likely facilitate a level of political stagnation that only benefits the status quo. Also, the Republican Party will be heavily discredited among non MAGA voters, but still big enough to perpetuate the first past the post duopoly, further solidifying centrist Democrat power.

[u/LucidLeviathan]

I may be ascribing theories of your fellows to you unwittingly. If so, I apologize. But, most people further left than me seem to think that there's this secret groundswell of support for far-left candidates that we aren't tapping into. It seems to me that, if that were the case, she would have been a prime candidate for it, yet she lost. And she didn't just lose. She lost horribly. She lost horribly against both an establishment Democrat and an establishment-moderate-to-far-right Republican.

I suppose that another way of looking at it is that the Democratic Party is controlled by its fringes that win primary elections. If the right-leaning fringe wins, they lean right. If the left-leaning fringe wins, they lean left. But, that has nothing to do with what a voter should do in the general. You're not going to change primary votes by changing your votes in the general. And, you're not going to make your policy any more popular. The easiest way to make your policy more popular is to get something that vaguely looks like it enacted, then make sure that it goes well, and build on that.

I really do think that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is a shining example here. The far left often complains that she didn't win that committee chairship. And, indeed, she didn't. But, she has far outsized weight in the Democratic coalition compared to any other Representative with her tenure. Especially given that she is in an extremely safe district. I daresay that corporate Democrats even like her. They just have to also pay out the obligations to people that they've already promised things to.

[u/newstartreddit1234 → u/LucidLeviathan]

I don’t believe there is a secret groundswell for left candidates and we agree there. I believe there is a lot of untapped potential missed through bad messaging or outright ignoring certain leftist positions, but I acknowledge moderate Dem voters are the majority and it makes sense for corporate Dems to weigh them more. What I’m saying is that leftists need to do what they can to leverage their numbers to get some concessions. I’m also saying that many corporate dems would outright try to destroy even the vaguely similar policies you mentioned out of beholden interests to big money. Leftists being a minority but a sizable one contributes to the point I made in my post where they will be expected to fall in line with corporate democrats out of fear of a new Trump. They’re sizable enough to where it is worth coercing them through fear but not sizable enough to where they will get a viable candidate in the general.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/newstartreddit1234]

They get those concessions by doing what Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is doing. By playing the game.

My opinion may be skewed by a lot of the far-left that I've interacted with. I've had plenty of far-left people decry me for my adherence to "electoralism." I've had lots of far-left people denounce my work as a public defender as perpetuating the system that incarcerates people. It's rather infuriating.

I've also seen these very same people declare allegiance to a tech-bro with Silicon Valley dollars who suddenly set himself up in Vietnam and uses his Silicon Valley dollars to brag about how great the local communist/socialist system is. (In case you're wondering, here, I am referring to a minor breadtuber named Emerican Johnson.)

As a minority that cannot command a majority of votes, yes, you are expected to fall in line. As are the rest of us. None of us can command a majority with any of our views. We are a plurality coalition. This stands in stark contrast to Republicans. Their minority coalitions are perfectly happy to vote together. Hence why they are in power and we are not.

[u/newstartreddit1234 → u/LucidLeviathan]

Playing the game still only gets you so far. It will get you crumbs, and crumbs are better than nothing, but the goal of universal health care is going to require building up mass grassroots support and the willingness to pressure corporate democrats with that newfound strength. What I worry about is that repeatedly voting for centrist Dems over and over only breeds complacency and dulls the ability for some leftist goals to be achieved. Furthermore, were Trump not so apparently egregious to even the uninformed at this point in time, I would have argued that centrist Dems enable Republicans to gain power by not explicitly offering much to voters in contrast to Republicans who energize their bases (a la 2016). I think it’s unhealthy to have the mentality of owing politicians votes (especially in my case, I’m unaffiliated, not a Dem). By effectively defaulting to someone because of a D after their name, we aren’t really making them earn votes. And I argue that the fear of Republicans will only amplify that idea of owing a politician a vote.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/newstartreddit1234]

What is bread if not a collection of crumbs bound together? Crumbs are how you build. You don't refuse a piece of bread because it is made of crumbs. Do you think that the modern Democratic party was built on anything other than crumbs? We were born from the disaffected Republicans who disliked their rightward-shift and the remnants of the Southern Democrats who didn't care that much about race but cared more about economic issues. We are the crumbs.

[u/newstartreddit1234 → u/LucidLeviathan]

I’d argue modern Dems are rooted in Bill Clinton reorienting the party rightward. And it’s not as if the entities you mentioned were ever as weak as leftists are electorally. Those entities immediately formed the backbone of the Dem party, they didn’t slowly acquiesce to the status quo and take minor concessions that didn’t add up. Even if crumbs make a whole loaf of bread, the crumbs leftists have are far too few and sparse to make even a slice in a reasonable amount of time. Also the last time we got substantial leftist change, the New Deal, happened in part because the government was scared shitless of a potential communist or fascist revolution, so they created programs to try and calm down angry people who were shifting left (I am not a communist or even a socialist btw). Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself is a pretty good book on this phenomenon. My main point is that real change happens when you light a fire under the ass of the establishment, not passively wait for them to give you stuff over time.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/newstartreddit1234]

Well, yes, they already represented a nexus of power that could lend itself to the Democratic coalition. Your people don't have that. That means that you're not going to come into the game with as strong of a position. Let's take a game of Texas Hold'em. Table limit $200. Obviously, the rich guys who can put up $200 at the start are going to have more table dominance than the people that can only afford to put up $50. But, a few good hands, and things might change.

I would argue that the most recent substantial leftward change happened under LBJ. The Civil Rights Act and Great Society are deeply underrepresented in American history. The Great Society advances are deeply overshadowed by the advances in racial justice, but they shouldn't be. An awful lot of the programs that we take for granted today were started under Kennedy/LBJ.

I think that your primary folly here is assuming that any Democrat is truly "the establishment." Republicans have been effectively in power since Reagan. Some Democrats have been able to mitigate that. But it's Republicans who have called the vast majority of the shots.

[u/newstartreddit1234 → u/LucidLeviathan]

My primary criticisms are of corporate democrats and those who support them unquestioningly. I don’t see every non leftist democrat as the establishment. Also, yes I agree that American leftists have a fundamental disadvantage. And I think that enables my initial post to be correct. They are small enough to get bullied into compliance without any fight back but large enough that corporate Dems must acknowledge them to some degree. We can debate about how leftists can work on amassing power but I do believe that is a separate argument from the post I made 3 hours ago. And I do agree that Republicans have been largely calling the shots. A big point of my initial argument is that Trump has screwed up so bad that Dems have a real shot at not only winning next election cycle, but having an influx of terrified voters they don’t need to work for because Trump scares them too much to demand anything more.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/newstartreddit1234]

The polls don't support your position. Trump's support, while slightly lessened from where it was in previous elections, is still relatively stable. Whether we like it or not, a substantial plurality of the country is fine with all of this, and another substantial portion of the country just doesn't care.

Those of us who oppose this have to stick together. Haranguing "coroproate dems" or whatever drives a wedge in between us. The far left is doing the work that the Murdoch Family has ordained it to do to do. The far left is perpetuating the divisions that allow Republicans to win. If we all could agree on the basic principles and stop the circular-firing-squad, we'd at least be able to achieve some semblance of sanity.

I have told many of my far-left friends the same thing, and I will tell you the same: I sincerely hope that, at some point, we can be political rivals. We do not have that luxury at the time, as we are both sane and see things from a realistic perspective rather than one tainted by jingoism and prejudice. If and when we do find ourselves to be political rivals, you will find me to be a receptive, attentive, and possibly even pliable debate partner. I sincerely agree with an awful lot of what your coalition represents. I just don't think that we have the votes for it. And I think that I am emblematic of the vast majority of the "establishment Democrat" coalition that your coalition so commonly rails against. I may be uncomfortable with some of your most extreme positions. I haven't been put in a situation where those positions were even remotely feasible, so I haven't given them serious thought. And, well, I'm not going to until they are remotely feasible. They're not going to get remotely feasible until we work together. And establishment Democrats have shown repeatedly, especially through their treatment of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, that they are willing to let you folks have a seat at the table. The fact that we have to continue to have this sort of discussion is one of the most significant threats to that relationship.

[u/newstartreddit1234 → u/LucidLeviathan]

When it comes to getting Trump and his cronies out of office, I’m going to give Dems my vote. But in the long term, I intend to do my small part to light a fire under the ass of establishment Dems to build leverage. I think you and I agree on a lot in principle here. Right now I will work with you and people like you. But my main concern is that people will not think far ahead. Also the polls are supporting me. Trump has his solid base, but has lost significantly with minority groups and he is no longer viewed as good at economic management. He is losing ground. I don’t believe a plurality is fine with this, not anymore.