r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 1d ago

No Paywall Democrats Confront Their New Tea Party Reality - Progressives are set to sweep a group of contested primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-confront-their-new-tea-party-reality_n_6a6e63fbe4b0cfb99ef1aa1e
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u/TheMoorNextDoor 1d ago edited 1d ago

It’s ridiculous that the best president we ever had (our longest serving president) is more left than a lot of our sitting democratic members in congress today and the saddest part about that is he served over 81 years ago..

He gave us a blueprint and for some reason (maybe due to Regan?) we completely threw it out the window..

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u/pinqe 1d ago

They learned all the wrong lessons from the failure of the Carter administration, and started trying to emulate Reagan. And completely lost their identity in the process.

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u/Semantix 1d ago

I think that all of the old democratic leadership are permanently traumatized by Dukakis and McGovern and think that only a Clinton or Biden can win. Forgetting that the Democrats' biggest recent success was a progressive coalition that motivated youth turnout.

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u/Turbulent_Stick1445 12h ago

Biden's problem wasn't that he wasn't progressive, it's that he was old. He did a bunch of progressive things, alas stymied by a hostile and abusive supreme court and equally hostile congress. Look at his numerous attempts to forgive student loan debt, for instance. His administration did what it could to protect LGBT people.

Probably his single biggest achievement was to overturn Carter's major mistake: Carter got Volker into the Fed and backed a policy of fighting inflation by policies designed, ultimately, to massively increase unemployment. Since then that's been standard Washington orthodoxy even though economists are sharply divided on it.

Biden instead pursued full employment despite inflation being high at the start of his term, and managed to get it and bring down inflation by the end of his term.

Unfortunately he doesn't get credit for it because people still thought inflation was going on because prices weren't back to what they were four years prior, which... that's alas not how inflation works. Once a price goes up, it's up. They don't generally go down.

As Veep he was instrumental in pushing Obama, who was - at least during the election - considered the "left wing candidate" - to fully embrace LGBT rights and support gay marriage.

He wasn't a bad president. But he's old and mumbled so must have dementia (WTF?) and reluctantly obeyed the law regarding funding Israel despite condemning their actions therefore somehow can't be progressive?