Posted on 03/10/2020 5:12:14 PM PDT by Libloather
How did the political left squander the opportunity that was the 2020 primary campaign?
The Trump presidency has created tremendous energy among progressives. More than half of Democratic voters now identify as liberal. Most favor “Medicare for all.” A growing number are unhappy with American capitalism.
This year’s campaign offered the prospect of transformational change, with a Democratic nominee who was more liberal than any in more than a half-century. Instead, the nominee now seems likely to be a moderate white grandfather who first ran for president more than 30 years ago and whose campaign promises a return to normalcy.
**SNIP**
You can see this pattern today in the ways that many progressive activists misread public opinion. Their answer to almost every question of political strategy is to insist that Americans are a profoundly progressive people who haven’t yet been inspired to vote the way they think. The way to win, these progressives claim, is to go left, always.
Immigration? Most Americans want more of it. Abortion? This is a pro-choice country. Fracking? People now understand its downsides. Strict gun control? Affirmative action? A wealth tax? Free college? Medicare for all? Widely available marijuana? Americans want it all, activists claim.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This author seriously needs a course on logic fallacies - argumentum ad populum..
Re: “Conservatives, in general, still did not understand the enemy was the media, until after the election of 1994.”
Sorry, that’s ridiculous.
I have been politically active since the 1964 Goldwater campaign. The media destroyed Goldwater, destroyed support for the Vietnam War, and destroyed Nixon in 1974.
1994 was the pinnacle of Conservative political power.
Since the Gingrich implosion in 1995-96, American Conservatives have had no consequential national leadership.
In 2020, Trump is the most Conservative candidate who has a chance to be elected president - which is why I will vote for him.
However, Trump has never been a Conservative, and, as far as I know, Trump has never called himself a Conservative.
Nationally, American Conservatives have always been a numerical minority.
The only reason we win national elections sometimes is because we have the highest voter turn out of any other political group.
That advantage has been crushed by 35 years of massive LEGAL immigration.
Win or lose in 2020, Trump will be the last Republican president in American history.
We probably have different definitions of what a conservative is.
Trump is enacting more conservative policies than any president since Coolidge, it seems to me.
He could not have been elected without alternatives to the legacy media, and his attacks on the legacy media.
Are you saying you saw the Media as the dominant political power in 1964?
If so, you were in a very small group.
Conservatives are not primarily genetic. They can be made.
McKinley, Coolidge, Goldwater, Reagan (first term), and Senator Phil Gramm would all work for me. Newt Gingrich, also, until he was hit by a tidal wave of ethics complaints and criminal investigations and abandoned by the Republican Party.
My two most important Conservative publications have come and gone. National Review before Buckley died. And, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal until 1995, when it moved from pro-immigration to open borders and universal Amnesty.
Commentary was an excellent neo-Con, center-right, pro-Israel magazine until about 1990. “Neo-Con” used to mean former Democrat intellectuals who defected to the GOP.
American Spectator has always been excellent, but somehow it never quite graduated into the Conservative mainstream.
Re: “Trump could not have been elected without alternatives to the legacy media, and his attacks on the legacy media.”
I agree.
Re: “Are you saying you saw the Media as the dominant political power in 1964?”
Not really.
I am saying that the all consuming goal of the Political Left has been the TOTAL destruction of American Conservatives and the Republican Party since at least 1964.
At least.
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