Deciding to Win: A Common Sense Renewal of the Democratic Party

9 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by apsec112
(decidingtowin.org)

12 Comments

PaulHoule

6 hours ago

The phrase "common sense" is a bad smell to me.

dboreham

6 hours ago

Because of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense ?

PaulHoule

6 hours ago

No, Paine is an OG, he's fine.

It is more that if somebody says "X is common sense" it is not really a statement about X but rather a statement that "(not X) is not common sense".

If you look at the names endorsing that document the first one is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carville

who was associated with Clinton's winning 1992 campaign and the losing campaigns of Kerry in 2004 and the other Clinton in 2008 and other people to the right of the Democratic party. It's true that this contingent can point to a few presidential wins but both Clinton and Obama were accompanied with a long-term erosion of the Democratic presence in congress and especially in state houses -- a time when Democrats have been winning at fundraising and losing at everything else.

Jurgen Habermas points out that a viable political system has to have public participation but also expert guidance on many issues. For instance, AI, advanced manufacturing, and climate change all require more than "common sense" to get on top of.

It would be good for the Democratic party to agree that cis lives matter, stop using words like "LatinX", etc. That document is not saying though that the Democrats should make a break with long-term trends that have eroded people's trust in institutions.

wredcoll

5 hours ago

I feel like most of my exposure to the term "common sense" has been people trying to justify with rhetoric positions that don't actually stand up to detailed logical discussion.

The "expert guidance" thing is an interesting point, our american system seems to make the existence of this dependent on the whims of the executive who is elected for completely unrelated issues.

I suspect that if you presented a simple poll question: "should donald trump have (more?) expert guidance available", the vast majority of people would say yes.

Of course, donald trump is famously not someone who would ever try to get access to or listen to expert guidance and everyone voting for him knew this and he was still elected.

pstuart

6 hours ago

Understandable to (to me) an acceptable placeholder for expressing a sentiment of re-evaluation.

There are so many failings of the Democratic party leadership, but I'd put near the top the failure to message and to let the opposition define the language and terms of concern.

My hopes are tempered that they can figure things out, and more importantly, deliver the goods. The good old "both sides are the same" only holds true in the fact that party leadership is beholden to the economic elites.

stevenalowe

5 hours ago

Interesting - can the party resist the lure of class envy and address real issues directly? I doubt it

acessoproibido

6 hours ago

Most of the advice sounds a bit like they should become the new Republican Party. Which makes sense bc the old one is pretty much dismantled at this point.

jfengel

2 hours ago

The Republican party's ideology may be unrecognizable, but the party itself has all of the same membership. The Democratic party has had little success courting Republicans who claim to be disaffected with the current administration, and I don't think that leaning into that even harder is likely to work.

The Democrats had big successes earlier this month by doing exactly the opposite: pandering to the left. That's anathema to the Clinton-era Democrats who created this proposal, but at this point it may be the best hope they have. They just demonstrated that they do have the ability to win, and they offer a much more exciting platform than moderate center-right.

I myself am more ideologically in line with the authors of this site than with the left. If the Democratic party does shift that direction there will be a lot of conflict. But that conflict gets me at least some of what I want, while continuing to lose to a highly-energized far right leaves me unequivocally worse off.

PaulHoule

6 hours ago

That was kinda Clinton's plan all along. For better and for worse he continued Reagan's legacy and made the Democratic party more palatable to donors than Republicans. Problem is that they now win national elections by just a hair when they do win, and downballot there has been a long term trend of losing state-level elections and a struggle to maintain any ability to be effective in the Senate.

jfengel

2 hours ago

There are a lot of Clinton-era names on that site.

bequanna

6 hours ago

> Donald Trump and the Republican Party are damaging our economy and threatening our democracy.

The very first words in the very first sentence illustrate the problem. Since ~2016, the Democratic party has (mostly) defined itself as anti-Trump party, with some gender/identity issues mixed in.

Trump firmly believes there is no such thing as bad press. Giving him endless attention is playing into his hand. Choosing to play his game.

This piece makes some good points on how the Democratic party should shift policy to start talking about things voters actually care about, but first they need to tone down the anti-Trump rhetoric and stop feeding his hype machine.

wredcoll

5 hours ago

Yeah, it feels like a "vote against him" rather than a "vote for me" position.

The republicans tried that for a while before trump and had little success.