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Comment by Animats

5 days ago

In the US, both the Left and the Right have been taken over by their more fringe elements. For now, the Right has won.

Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups. Too few votes. (See Sex in America, the Definitive Study,[1] which selected their survey group randomly across the whole US and followed up with mailed, in person, and paid interviews, until they got >90% participation. Most other surveys have some degree of self-selection of the participants.)

Occupy Wall Street never came up with a political agenda. Black Lives Matter had a huge agenda, and one of the groups claiming to be in charge had a document over a hundred pages full of demands. Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population. Nobody was pushing to break up monopolies that raised prices, even in apartment rentals and health care where collusion has been proven.

This lack of focus lost elections.

The Right agenda is basically tax cuts for the rich, plus God, Family, and Guns. That's enough to form a majority.

So here we are.

[1] https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up

11 comments

Animats

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TwoFerMaggie  5 days ago

> Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population.

I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.

The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness.

Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.

  • SpicyLemonZest  5 days ago

    It seems to me that there's no place for it precisely because of what PG calls "woke". Class consciousness doesn't work if it's not reciprocal. Obama put up great working class numbers, but the modern Democratic coalition isn't willing to pander to socially conservative views, so it doesn't work so well anymore.

    A pithy but I really feel important example: a party with no room for Joe Rogan in it is definitionally not a party of the working class.

tstrimple  4 days ago

> Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups.

This isn't the left's strategy. It's the right's. The right targets these small groups because they know we won't let them be attacked. We will push back. It makes it very easy to paint the left as trying to cater to LGBT folk, but that's nonsense that only sells to those completely out of the loop. Which is unfortunately most of the US electorate. And it's not about it being a strategy. It's about being an ally against bigotry. It takes a really fucked up person to abandon millions of people to increased discrimination because you think it'll help your polling with middle America.

  • eplit  4 days ago

    What about bigotry against women? That is the actual effect of pro-trans policy.

    The right capitalized on that because the left was too blinded by ideology to see the harm caused to women.