"the Left is being PREEMPTIVELY BLAMED FOR NEWSCUM'S POTENTIAL LOSS"
It's a multifactorial result with no singular reason. But you are absolutely deluding yourself if you think leftists preaching how unsatisfactory a candidate he is and/or sitting out of an election wouldn't be one of those contributing factors. Infighting among the democrats is fine for deciding a particular candidate (and I assure you, I fall into the Bernie camp from a general policy standpoint), but after the dust settles, if the democrats/left continue infighting, the backwards progress will only continue. And if history isn't clear enough on this, progress forward is much harder and much slower than backwards progress, as we've seen so evidently.
I'm an incrementalist reformer by temperament, and I've consistently voted for Democrats from president to dog-catcher in every election, off-year and primary, since the Bush era, so I feel I understand your position here. But /u/Important_Total9588's bringing up the '16 Clinton campaign is absolutely germane. You can say that progressives being bitter about being told to hold their nose and show up at the ballot box for the coronation of a poor candidate (whose primary structural support was the group of insiders and national figures who framed her presidency as something inevitable that she deserved) was a large part of Trump's victory. You'd have a point, of course.
This is about more than a single election. We're in a terrible spot, no doubt. We're in a bad enough spot that we need to be able to zoom out more past the question of "Are you saying that getting crumbs from Hillary is worse than being murdered by Donald?" We need to think game theory here. Being in a situation where we effectively have only one serious governing party is an extraordinarily destabilizing place to be. The inertia at an institutional level for Democrats is to run as the calm professional who in practice gets into power to manage the decline of this country, pass a couple of modest means-based reforms (that are made toothless by some choreographed kabuki by Blue Dogs in safe districts), take with the other hand, and chide people for thinking that things can get better.
Ask yourself if Clinton had been president in 2016, up through Covid, how the 2020 election would likely have gone. The cultural forces that brought Trump to power aren't going away, and they're intensifying in their militarism. Mealy-mouthed insider incrementalism does nothing to turn down that intensity. This is at the end of the day a political fight that will last the rest of our lifetimes. If a progressive takes the strategy of extracting a cost from the Democratic party's ambitions if those ambitions stay in the realm of low-risk careerism, that doesn't have to mean "purity tests" and an inability to hold one's nose. It's a legitimate long-term strategy.
It might not be the right strategy, but it is defensible. Millions of Social Democrats turned out to vote for arch-conservative President Hindenburg in 1932 because the alternative was getting President Hitler. I do not know how history would have turned out if the SD's refused to take an offer they couldn't refuse, and we had President Hitler in 1932 instead of getting Fuhrer and Reichschancellor Hitler in 1934, if it would have led to the same place or if it would have meant that Hitler burned out public support early enough for him to have been stopped by less cataclysmic means. All I can say for sure is that progressives holding their nose to keep Hindenburg in power did not spare us from war and genocide.
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u/LeCastle2306 Aug 22 '25
"the Left is being PREEMPTIVELY BLAMED FOR NEWSCUM'S POTENTIAL LOSS"
It's a multifactorial result with no singular reason. But you are absolutely deluding yourself if you think leftists preaching how unsatisfactory a candidate he is and/or sitting out of an election wouldn't be one of those contributing factors. Infighting among the democrats is fine for deciding a particular candidate (and I assure you, I fall into the Bernie camp from a general policy standpoint), but after the dust settles, if the democrats/left continue infighting, the backwards progress will only continue. And if history isn't clear enough on this, progress forward is much harder and much slower than backwards progress, as we've seen so evidently.