That is good news, now hopefully we'll still have mid-term elections next year
After 3 decades of neoliberal centrist "Third Way" cosplaying as Republicans on economics, and now a few aspects of progressivism still apparently not yet within the Overton Window for "moderate" / "independent" voters, I wonder if there should be a concerted effort within this cavernous big tent to mount a Fourth Way, sliding in between the centrist wing and any positions of the progressive wing that are still apparently going to lose elections for Dems when the electorate is is a mood highly susceptible to being gaslit by rightwing sky-is-falling talking points (even if they're not true, truth no longer matters in this country, that is very clear, and voters are clearly not rational, or we would've never had a second Trump term, and voters want thigns like lower energy prices yet energy prices didn't start going up until Trump started knee-capping a renewals sector that was thriving and cheaper than things like natural gas .... the electorate is every bit as frustrating as MAGA politicians)
single-issue voters are tiresome too ... the world is never as simple as one issue, and multiple issues can be addressed at the s
I wish Bernie had been the nominee in 2016 so we could at least see where the Overton Window actually was at that time, and it would've been less of a gamble ... but now that the voters have elected a dictator twice, everything is a gamble ... I love that Mamdani won in NYC, but obviously it's much easier to pull that off in NYC ... I'd love to see AOC as POTUS nominee in 2028, but then how risky is that in a nationwide general election, even just based on her sex, never mind her progressive creds? Twice now the country as a whole has balked at a female POTUS candidate, even though it's the 21st century, even though they have no problem electing female governors, even though a female head of state is not unusual at all elsewhere in the world ... it seems like an anomaly now that a Black man ever got elected (and as preferable as he is over MAGA, he's still a Third Way centrist, hardly a CoMmIe by any stretch of the imagination, and still getting paid handsomely by Netflix these days)
I just don't know, in a nationwide general POTUS election, how closely Dems still have to keep pretending to be Republican Lite now, to keep actual authoritarians out of the White House ... even though it was 30 years of copying Republican economics that seems to have alienated the traditional Dem base and led to the rise of the far right in the first place
I hate the possibility of having to keep recycling the Third Way playbook going forward because it is time to move on, but also the progressive wing needs to be very honest with itself, in this particular era, and admit whatever specific issues may be losing elections to actual fascists, that the country just is not there yet even though you could rationally explain to people why this or that item works, is not a threat, etc, they're just not able to accept it yet, and and if anything even remotely goes awry after you do convince them, they'll be ready to hit that same old same old 180 degree pendulum swing of just punishing the incumbent party regardless of anything, even if it's an utterly dumb and irrational thing to do and the apex of short-term thinking
You can't do ANYTHING progressive at all if you're losing elections to outright fascists, you actually have to win first, whatever winning entails, even if that means tabling this or that issue for now ... maybe even doing something that shoots the country in the foot but the voters just LOVE, like curtailing immigration (then let the electorate scratch their heads at why there's no one to pick crops or staff nursing homes in rural red states where all the non-elderly population has already fled for more opportunity, and it's going to be awhile before all the now-MAGA-subsidized "native" pronatalist spawn are old enough to flee too, erm, I mean staff rural nursing homes and pick crops, but at least in the meantime maybe you can do some sensible long-term green infrastructure building that actually, duh, creates jobs, for all those self-styled Economics single-issue voters who don't actually understand the first thing about economics, but by gawd they're allowed to vote just like the people who actually do)
