Stop treating politics like it’s still 2008…it ain’t. Vote for the best policy, not for the one CNN tells you is better.

Centrists are insane. Literally definitionally insane.

A definition for madness is "trying the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result."

We nominate corporate centrists election after election, and they lose again and again. Yet somehow these losers always get portrayed as reasonable and electable. Biden only squeaked out a win in 2020 because of covid. Even with a million Americans dead and in the ground, in large part due to Trump's mismanagement, corporate dems were so unpopular that Biden was only able to barely get over the finish line.

Stop treating politics like it’s still 2008…it ain’t. Vote for the best policy, not for the one CNN tells you is better.

This is the core of it. Some people form their opinions on what electability looks like in one era and then blindly carry that assessment forward for the rest of their lives. In the 90s and 2000s, being centrist was electable. Pre-2008, things were going pretty well in America. We were still riding the post-Cold War high and the long-term effects of neoliberal economics hadn't really come home to roost yet. The social compact was still reasonably intact. Not for all, but for most. If you played along with the system - get an education, work hard, get married, buy a house, avoid drugs and other destructive behaviors - your life was most likely going to be fine. Racism still existed. People still had their lives derailed by medical emergencies. But for enough of the population, things were well enough that "don't rock the boat" was a viable political platform. Some folks still protested of course. But most folks were comfortable enough to simply focus on their own lives.

We are no longer in that world. "Go along with the system and live a private life" is no longer a reliable path to a life of stability and dignity. It hasn't been that way since the Millennial generation came out of college. And elder millennials are in their early 40s right now. We're reaching a point where the majority of the electorate has had to live their entire adult lives in a condition of economic precarity. Neo-liberalism is toxic because more and more of the electorate has had to grow up under its effects.

This has completely transformed what an "electable candidate" even is.

Because progressives do not do the ground work. Not effectively. It's as if taking people who are social outcasts and asking them to compete in a battle of popularity puts them at a disadvantage.

But now is a good time. The left is yet again winning victories only because the right have fucked up so bad that people now want change.

You don’t feel the system that enslaved human beings based on their race “exalts nation and race over the individual?”

I’d say the US wasn’t fascist in that period because fascism is a post-industrial ideology that’s interrelated with corporate mass media. But, when it did come around, fascism was explicitly modeled on the “slavery + colonial genocide” era of the USA’s development. Fascism in the 20th century was the logic of colonialism coming home from the periphery to the imperial core.