Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Bernie Sanders is the Frontrunner for the Dems
by
Cnut237
on 27/02/2020, 22:43:57 UTC
Do you mean DNC or the voters? DNC would "support" him in the general election

I meant the DNC, and specifically the distinction between support and "support". Yes the electorate are lemmings, but I think that's a separate issue.

I'm going to shut up about the UK in a minute, because I don't want to derail a fascinating thread, but over on this side of the Atlantic we have seen over the last few decades that politicians have become more centrist. Of course centrism is relative, and the movement has largely been the left moving rightwards, because socialism was invalidated in the eyes of the electorate with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the two main parties have become more alike, and on occasion indistinguishable. Now at the same time, inequality has been rising and a lot of voters feel disenfranchised and unrepresented. Many voters have abandoned the centre to support radical outsider candidates from both the far-left and the far-right. The result of this is that the representatives of both parties are more similar to one another than they are to their respective voters. It is against this backdrop that we saw a huge body of Labour MPs preferring to sabotage their own electoral prospects in order to bring down their outsider leader. They saw having a Conservative government for a few years as a small price to pay in exchange for rooting out the socialism in their own party.

This is what I worry about in the US. I know the systems are somewhat different, but beneath it all people are people and the same everywhere. Support and "support" can produce profoundly different outcomes.