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Neither 'Democratic Socialism' or 'Defund the Police' were anywhere close to Biden's advertising and platform; he ran on the same terrible 'Orange Man Bad' messaging Hillary failed with, so it shouldn't surprise that he underperformed with pretty much the exact same shit approach in 2020, especially when there were initiatives and policies with 60-70% support ( including bipartisan support ) or greater he could have campaigned on, such as marijuana legalization, a federal jobs guarantee, an infrastructure spend, a wealth tax on the uber rich, his own public option, free public college/skilled trades education, campaign finance reform and so on.
Valid comments of course, but I think we need to look a little deeper at what Democrats really did this time.
To be blunt, Biden won but Democrats did not. Biden made the election a referendum on Trump or calm and Biden took home a record number of votes for a Presidential election. But the issue is Trump losing this time around took home the #2 spot on the record number of votes list. 73.6 million something people still looked at Trump and voted for him. There are not 73.6 million white nationalists and racists out there, nor are there that many people watching FoxNews in the evening then flooding AmericanThinker and HotAir the next morning. But they voted for Trump anyway, including a slightly larger number of minorities.
If Democrats are so right how did they lose a few House seats, not solidly flip the Senate, and not change a single State government? If Democrats are unwilling or that arrogant as to not ask themselves this then 2022 and 2024 could be brutal.
2020 was not great for them and speaks greatly to the underline problem. Not only are we ultra divided as a nation but the far left has *played the same game* just as much if not more than the far right. More importantly the splinters of far left authoritarian modern liberalism have become the very anchor to these issues that liberalism used to be concerned about moving on but no longer can. That is really what I am getting at.
We do not get to talk about the widening wealth gap or decreasing middle class because of "democratic socialism" and "be bold" (or whatever the hell Warren and Sanders were going on about.) We do not get to talk about police militarization and brutality because of "defund the police" and the takeaway notion from the left that silence is violence but a riot is not. We do not get to talk about the doctor patient relationship and overall health of this nation because of "government ran healthcare" even though we kinda already have that. And we do not get to talk about dealing with our social faults because of social justice warriors, the political correctness police, and the cancel culture modern liberalism embraced like a security blanket that made it impossible to discuss these issues without the very labels they embrace so long as they came up with the accepted label to use.
For the far left it is no longer about the issues themselves, the position gets a seat at the table of discussion, but ultimately the discussion ends up about marginalization of opposition to the point of protection bubbles and litmus tests for inclusion that makes them more oppressive oriented today than the KKK was back in middle part of the last century.
It is easy to brand modern liberalism with anything used to scare a voter, because they are those labels.