Democrats Are Already “Moderate.” It’s Not Working.
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/democrats-moderate-electoral-strategy/Open linkView original on scribe.disroot.org678
Comments144https://jacobin.com/2025/09/democrats-moderate-electoral-strategy/Open linkView original on scribe.disroot.org
No fucking shit, everyone knows this, even the democrats know this, most of them are just bought and paid for
Exactly.
I remember having mad respect for Biden for announcing his intention before 2020 of being a one term president.
It sickens me how much the Democrats dropped the ball.
Biden doesn't get enough hate. If he had allowed real primaries, the Democratic candidate would have won easily. Trump won again because right wing Democrats fight harder against progressive Democrats than they do against Republicans.
That's assuming the Democrats would even allow fair primaries. That shit has been rigged since forever.
My best "famous people" story is that I once had a private dinner with Joe Biden and his entire family, Jill and Beau and Hunter and their kids when they were small.
Now, instead of a great story, I had dinner with one of the worst presidents of our time.
Dammit Joe. You fucked up our country, and my story.
Given the competition, he's actually one of the best of our time.
That's not a good thing.
No. He's the modern Buchanan, but worse since the civil war we're careening towards wouldn't have happened if he'd not decided to run again.
True story
US Democrats are very conservative under their thin coat of identity politics. They would be considered way to the right of most European conservative parties.
They're even shedding that after loosing in 2024. Slowly was doing it during the election but then once lost immediately threw trans people and minorities under the bus for the dems incompetence
I don’t think this is actually true. Perhaps on some very specific issues but as a whole I’d say no. They are certainly to the right of left wing parties but many conservatives in Europe have also shifted right in recent years.
Correct. Most people who say this are focused on healthcare and other social safety net issues. When you look at LGBTQ+ rights, or racial discrimination, or even abortion, Democrats are further to the left of lots of European parties. It can be a slog to get a European to admit they even have racial issues at all.
Name a country in Europe where abortion, being gay are illegal or racial discrimination is so bad they have to overcorrect it with laws?
Russia
Ah ya got me. Now name a country in the European Union (which is what I meant)or that is only part of Europe and no other continent.
Admit it you just hate vampires.
So obviously I can't speak for all European countries, but I find it hard to see in what way the Dems would not be at least center-right here
yeah but center right isn't more right wing than European conservatives. Parties like AfD, PVV, RN, Vlaams Belang are more to the right of European conservatives. Those are straight up fascists. Dems would still be considered liberals in Europe and I mean the old classic liberalism not the weird definition Americans use who think liberalism is a left leaning ideology like progressivism. And liberals are mostly center right to right wing in Europe.
I disagree look at actual laws and policies, the rural and less educated areas might be loud but they don't hold any power. Stares at Roe v Wade in the US.
Democrats generally support roe v wade so this is a poor example.
The difference is in the US the rural and uneducated people do hold the power.
Yeah they "supported" it so much it was overturned great clown logic.
That also was my point about the dumb dumbs having actual power in the US, so swing and two misses.
I never said they were competent. But I don’t think there’s much question that they genuinely support abortion rights. If you believe otherwise, the ruling of a court with a supermajority controlled by the opposing party is very poor evidence. The Democratic appointees all voted to preserve it.
It's worse than that, in my opinion. The Dems feign incompetence to keep the game of distraction going. It's like WWE to keep us all blaming our neighbors while they take away more of our rights a little at a time. They let Rowe v. Wade get overturned on purpose so they have something to harp about in the future.
Obama suspended habeus corpus which goes back to the frigging Magna Carta: all they need to do is call you a terrorist or a traitor and they can just disappear your ass. Rhetorical side note: how can Julian Assange have committed treason if he wasn't an American to begin with?
Maybe in a few specific issues this happens but I think it’s more that dems face a lot of pressure from powerful people and they tend to buckle.
I don’t see any evidence of that with roe vs wade. They just didn’t think it would be overturned.
Are you talking about Guantanamo Bay with the Habeus Corpus stuff?
I've seen leftist Americans say that Bernie Sanders would be considered a right wing conservative in Europe. These people have no idea what the political landscape actually looks like in Europe. Some still believe Europe is a soc-dem Valhalla, because we have healthcare here. But many centrist parties have shifted right in Europe even in the Nordics. For example the center left Danish Social Democrats have implemented hardline asylum policies.
They're just trolling. Bernie is at least left of center. He is also the most left of any national politicians here. Democratic party leadership are roughly around where the Tories are in the UK.
Bill Clinton tried triangulation (read: being more right wing) and the republicans tried to impeach him. Obama was right of Reagan and the republicans…tried to impeach him. If the GOP is going to fuck with democrats no matter what, let’s just elect some truly revolutionary people. I mean people who make Bernie Sanders look like Mitt Romney. People who make Cornel West look like Paul Ryan. We should be running people who start at “if your net worth is over $100 million you get to line up against the wall” and need to be negotiated down from there.
Exactly. The next president should be very progressive - free health care for all, expand public services, get the 800 billionaires, millionaires and corporations to start paying taxes, increase teachers salary and minimum wage, make associate degrees free, no more bailing out industries/companies, get rid of monopolies, make paid pto mandatory of minimal 3 weeks. Call it project 2029 and create the manual for it now so that it’s actualized on day 1. I can dream can’t I? Maybe in 40 years this will be possible….
I voted for Obama in 2008 for exactly this reason, that was his platform. Then I watched from my hospital bed in 2010 (partial colonectomy due to diverticulitis) while they (the House and Senate) voted it down. I don't know if he/they was/were corrupted by pharma money after the fact, or if he/they ever intended to follow through to begin with.
In the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, he quotes Obama where he makes the excuse that having Medicare for All would leave 3 million insurance workers out of a job. That would be like stifling the proliferation of electric lighting because of the impact it would have on the whaling industry.
The d’s have been actively disallowing progressive agenda to come into fruition. Someone(s) in the party was not allowing Obama to move forward with the plan.
The public option was killed, specifically, by Joe Lieberman. Not the Democratic party as a whole, or Obama.
The dems could have taken him off all committee assignments and had the AG go after he and his family's financial misdeeds unless he played ball. They could have included it in budget reconciliation. They could have simply changed the rules to allow them to break filibuster with 50+vp. They chose to let Lieberman stop them.
The public option was there to be bargained away. They never intended to enact it. Joe Lieberman had to play the part of the opposition since the republicans are too racist to ever bargain with a black president.
Lieberman was reviled by the party after that. Trying to act like he was some kind of avatar of the Democrats is revisionist history. The party literally primaried him out and he had to run as an independent. He spent the rest of his life whining about how mean Democrats were to him.
He was primaried before that happened. That's why he played that part.
Amen! I want Democrats to do all the things that Republicans accuse them of doing. I want them to do this because being reasonable is not winning brownie points with these people. The next president should tell America to get ready for a new national flag; we're adding 3 more stars for Puerto Rico, Guam, and Washington DC!
We can dream
We can do more than that.
They aren’t moderate they are where the far right was in 2000
Tell that to older gay people
I grew up in a gay family so I know all about this subject. I can argue that the democrats continuously moved farther right while using a few social justice issues as a smokescreen.
This is true, but that does not mean that they haven't made life materially better for LGBTQ+ people, even if it was a cynical calculation for many of them.
It’s starting to look like those rights and the rights of women are just going to be taken away and then surprise the parties combine into one faction of facism
Look at the money both parties are receiving from aipac. 95 democrats voted to give Charlie Kirk a holiday. Two wings of the same bird.
Moderates? Maybe 30 years ago. As they shift the Overton window they stay in lockstep with Republicans as they shift to the right, filling the void left by Republicans. Policy wise they sit somewhere between GW Bush and first term Trump
Well things change, I guess supporting genocide is moderate these days.
Controlled opposition.
Democrats now are where Republicans were in the 80s
This is correct. They've "moderated" their views so many times over the years that they are only distinguishable from Reagan Republicans because of their stance on abortion.
And people are even calling for Dems to be more "pro-life" in order to further appeal to "moderates." It's absurd.
There's no such thing as meeting Nazis in the middle. That's called "becoming a Nazi".
In the UK, our politics are currently similar. Our centre-left party is Labour, who are in government, but they're losing popularity. Keir Starmer, the leader of Labour, has made Labour more moderate. They've lost some voters to the Reform party (populist right) but they've lost even more voters to parties that are left of Labour (Lib Dems and Greens).
There's a left-wing Labour politician called Andy Burnham who has criticised Labour's direction, and he said something which I think can apply to the US too:
I'll spot you that Corbyn was centre-left back in 2015. The current Starmer government is indistinguishable from the Tories (in no small part because a bunch of the New Labour Starmerites are literally just Tory transplants) who occasionally stake out positions to the right of Farage's fascist Reform platform.
But hey, at least you've got "Your Party" now. As soon as they stop suing each other, anyway.
Part of the problem with modern politics is that its so tied up in the News/Social Media cycle that running on "the same old idea that was as good then as it is now" is seen as bad politics. You can't just come out and day "We should hire more doctors for the NHS and pay their lowest level staff better wages" or "We need strong labor unions in the country again in order to claw back surplus value from the employer class" because that's old boring socialist slop. You can't even have a Mamdani-esque "We're going to have government run grocery stores that trade basic staples at cost of production to fight inflation" without being heckled as a radical marxist who flunked economics.
None of that gets the national media jazzed up. The only way to get people (in national media) excited is to talk about the latest Tech-Thingy and insist New Tech is going to be the panacea for all your problems. And then, every time a New Tech thing comes out, you pivot to that and insist its going to bring about the cost cutting (ie, lower wages and higher capital costs) reform everyone secretly desires.
That's the only thing that qualifies as a "Big Idea" in the eyes of national media reporters. So that's the tail our political dogs are told to chase. Forever. Nevermind that it never seems to fucking work, save to enrich a few special interests in the tech industry.
Yeah I get depressed when I see the news or politicians mention AI, as if it will solve every problem. I think LLMs can genuinely be useful but we should be realistic about them.
You mentioned Mamdani. I think what's interesting about him is that he is polling well - he could win the election, even with his big ideas. So maybe there is an appetite for big ideas from the left. Which I guess is why there have been quite a few people interested in Your Party (but yes, whether they can stop bickering and function together is yet to be seen).
He's captured a moment within the city when every single other person running sucks enormous amounts of ass. I suspect he'd get flattened by a '00s era Bloomberg or a '90s era Giuliani. But the political scene in NYC has been hollowed out. Running for office is a thankless task. Governing is an even more thankless task. Getting a job selling bitcoins to public pensions and high frequency trading tickets to the next Taylor Swift concert via some weird wholesaler app is significantly more lucrative.
Guys like Adams, Sliwa, Cuomo, and Mamdani are what's left after you've stripped state and local politics of anything except the cheapest form of bribery and the most naive form of ideological optimism.
I think I'll take naive optimism these days. It seems better than doom, gloom, and billionaires trying to own everything, while charging you more and more for essential goods and services.
I don't view Democrat leadership as moderate at all. "Centrist", just means Republican policies that boil the frog.
Tell that to the NYT.
"Clever people say that once you become exactly like your opponent you will win elections!"
And even that wouldn't work because this opponent would likely just move further right. Not sure there's anywhere to go anymore, but they'd try.
The Nazis only got as far right as they could because they were stopped. It's musical chairs for outgroups, everyone gets a turn being vermin eventually.
That’s why it isn’t working.
We don’t want moderates. Moderates aren’t the ones that will get Civil Rights, campaign reform, rein in monopolies, get rid of Citizens United, health care for all, etc. Moderates just half-ass “solutions” that keep stuffing more money in the already wealthy’s pockets while ineffectively trying to get bakeries to make wedding cakes for gay couples. We need actual liberals and progressives, not Republican-lite.
Fuck, so many signs, so many failures for so many years...
Say what you want for Republicans but they plan and play long term and they play it well. So many small losses, but every hundred losses, another quiet, hidden step forward to eroding democracy... Fox news, the Republican state TV channel, winning a lawsuit enabling them to call themselves a news organization while lying, hell, since Reagan...
The US has been sliding in this direction for 4-5 decades now, look where you've gotten yourself, it's embarrassing...
I think this is simplifying and twisting narratives. Republicans didn't plan for Trump, but the evangelicals and extremists rolled with it (just like progressives and antifa would've rolled with someone like Bernie). Besides an authoritarian take over of elections, the republicans don't seem to be putting anyone electable up on a podium lately.
I doubt any of us are privy to what the Democrats plan and play long term, if anything they've been more effective at controlling their party if we're looking at them through the lens of being moderates. If you think they're "failing".... it's in the eyes of a citizen and not what their donor's interests are which is the priority of the party.
I am interested to learn about how the rest of the world is handling the "news" issue though, I see a lot of media coming from other countries (like UK and Australia) which follow the same format of fox so figured we were all fucked when it comes to actually vetting what can be labeled as a news source.
Status quo has got to go.
Hey hey ho ho
Democrats and Republicans are two halves of the one party state in America
I'd say quite a few of them are conservative bordering on reactionary. You just can't see it for all the MSNBC talking heads that insist Henry Cuellar is the far left of the political spectrum and anyone beyond that is a Tankie posting from a North Korean IP address.
The whole moderate thing was an attempt to appeal to Republican voters. They live in a personality cult echo chamber now, it would serve no purpose except catering to ghost. The fact that they are still thinking within a system that has been fundamentally corrupted is why they are doomed to failure.
There are only two parties in that stupid place, what the hell would they think being diet right would do?
Make them money
Conventional wisdom among dems since the 90s has been triangulation; all voters vote for the candidate closest to their ideology, so if you can get the republican to move as far right as possible, say Hitler, then triangulate your positions to be one iota left of the republican, say 99% Hitler, then everyone left of 99.5% Hitler has to vote for you.
In practice, this only wins elections if the republican is more incompetent than Donald Trump. But democrats who believe this get tons of money from donors, and its apoealimg to the sort of class position who can afford to become congressional staffers.
And that is why the us is no longer a democracy, if someone is right wing leaning they are going to vote for the republicans, but if they are not then they are forced to vote for the "not as bad" party. Issue to me is, every time someone has to swallow their convictions and vote for the lesser evil they get a a bit more disgruntled. After so many years of being worn down, combined with low wages and higher costs of living people start to check out or vote for the worst out of spite.
Big tent politics always seem to fail, the parties that do this tend to lose a coherent platform. Issue with the states is that unlike other nations there is only the two parties, and no realistic way to have another. So now the states had evil and evil lite teams instead of like anywhere else where the dems would have been pushed out by a actual left.
Well, democracts mostly act like the other side of the coin of republican. And it's not hard to understand why when you see PACs and millionaires funding both.
The vast majority of Democrats are center-right. That's not moderate.
Get disgruntled voters to vote again, drive up turnout, maybe the Dems will win.
Try to convert brainwashed fascists to fasc-lite: absolute recipe for continued failure.
The DNC wants the Dems to be the Washington Generals.
Every potential convert you were ever going to turn happened election day 2020.
The "leadership" of the Democrat party sits to the right of several disparate further left factions. Because they don't embrace any specific leftward direction, they are juggling half baked compromises instead of leading anywhere. Bold policies that would be approved of by one further left group are opposed by others, so they can't go left without losing support somewhere. Staying where they are makes them moderately disagreeable for every one of the factions that can support and vote for them, so they are unpopular across the board. They are all but trapped not far enough to the right to contend for Republican votes, and not far enough left to propose anything truly different.
I see the candidacy of further left individuals (mostly at the local level for now, but this will move fast if the "leadership" collapses further) as the first serious mechanism to break this stalemate. Popular figures from city or state government aim for national positions frequently, so expect anyone standing out with how well they run things at the local level to make that pivot.
A similar thing is at play on the right. Christian fundamentalists, war hawk neoconservatives, the alt right, the would-be fascists, select business interests, nationalists, libertarians, and others are constantly battling over policy. At this moment about 70% of them are trying to ride Trump's popularity and apparent effectiveness at making changes to get whatever is most important to them done before it's too late. If the Republicans gain seats in 2026, that surface level unity will become even more significant, but once Trump is out of the picture, infighting is all but certain to resume on the right, and we'll see weaker, "keep everyone happy" politicians take center stage again.
If both those processes play out with the right timing, we may get a true leftist running against a Jeb tier Republican in 2028 or 2032.
Quite an editorial about-face for Jacobin isn't it.
...no?
....
whelp, time to shave your head.
Let's be honest. The majority of the U.S. is not progressive. If you pit a far left candidate against are far right on the national stage then right will win every time.
Vote as far as you can in your local and state elections because your vote has a much larger impact in those races. When it comes to the Federal races, please just vote for who has a solid chance even if it's a moderate because let's be honest... Anything is better than what we have now.
I actually think this is the opposite of the situation. You’re probably right that the majority of the US would not identify as progressive, but I’m confident the majority of the US would vote for progressive candidates if we had elections that weren’t predetermined by gerrymandering. If our elections were also free from corporate interests, the US would be a fully progressive democratic socialist country, and I’m sure most people would be happy with what that means for them and their families.
The US is obsessed with labels. If a candidate runs on practical progressive policies without calling them progressive, they can often do really well. It’s not a fluke that right wingers have been showing up in support of Bernie and AOC.
Post-election polls say Bernie would've won if he was the candidate against Trump in 2016. America would definitely vote for a progressive. I mean, hell, Obama ran as a progressive and destroyed the Republican candidate.
If the DNC wants to win, they know how. They've won before by talking about social polices, rebuilding American infrastructure, talking about removing debt from the citizens, improving healthcare, abortion rights...
They copied the Republican playbook from 2016 for 2024, while saying The economy is doing good, don't complain! like Trump is doing now with his Tariff bullshit. It's actually your fault you can't pay rent and eat food at the same time, pleb!
Remember when we were going to get monthly $1000 checks to help with COVID? Cancel student debt for all Americans? Codify Roe v. Wade? Arrest Trump?
But we're the bad guys for having the memory of Democrat voters instead of Republican shitheads.
To be honest I don't think they needed to do all that to beat Trump. They just needed to run another man. Hilary, Biden, and Harris went up against Trump and one of them won. What's the difference?
Hillary won the popular vote. More people voted for her then Trump. She lost the electoral college vote, due to it being a system made by slavers to keep slave states happy.
TRUE, and not to be ignored either. This is the second time in my memory that dems got screwed by that.
The majority of the US are brainwashed by corporate propaganda to vote against their own best interests and dont even know what "progressive" means.
Those moderates and their ratchet effect has contributed to our current conditions.
People want to vote for somebody popular, call them what you will. Somebody that's fighting for them.
Absolutely nobody likes the Democrats, the last presidential elections have shit shows with the most unpopular possible candidates running is the status quo, there are no challenges for house leadership, or Senate leadership, no criticism in the party.
Maybe you should question those people telling you that that is what is electable and not those popular things like not getting ass fucked by the rich without your consent.
Ive never had the option to vote for a moderate from a major party.
When haven't the dems run moderates? Hell most brag at how moderate they are and how much they'll compromise with the republican extremists, yet won't with progressives
Weeeird.
[biden has entered the chat]
I know. As a proud bidenist-leninist I must support the savior of all free peoples, the greatest hero the working class has ever had or will ever have.
Yeah that guy in government for 50 years that helped sail this ship into today was "moderate" hard s
Democrats are the furthest thing from "moderate", they are on the extreme center. The idea that liberal centrism can't be extremist is damaging. Supporting endless proxy warfare in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza and austerity at home are all irrational, extremist positions that the Democrats (and most liberal parties in other countries) believe in.
thank you for identifying this guy. His response to you clinched it.
Oh, I'm sure the Ukrainians would love peace. too bad the Russians just want to wipe them out, so peace isn't really an option for them
Personally I hope Ukrainians do what they want - if a majority of them really do want a negotiated end to the war then they should do that.
I bet most of them probably want Russia to ultimately leave Ukraine though, and if they want help in achieving that, then I think we should help Ukraine.
Everybody agrees with supporting Ukraine including myself, the problem is that saying "maybe there should be a ceasefire and negotiated land swap" or "Ukraine should learn to live with Russia on their borders" triggers an extreme reaction in a lot of liberal centrists that just highlights the point in my original post 🤷♀️ Meanwhile Ukranians are being shoved into busses and forced to fight a losing war.
I definitely don't want people to be forced to fight - it should be up to Ukrainians what they want to do. You have a point about Ukrainians wanting a negotiated end to the war. I found this:
Hopefully other countries can help Ukraine get as close as possible to a situation where they have Ukrainian land back, and where Ukrainians can determine their own future, instead of being pushed around by Russia.
Yes, saying Ukraine should surrender is going to trigger people.
Not sure what the alternative is, Ukraine has run out of manpower and the ones that are left don't want to keep fighting. We can dump all the money we have into the pit and it won't solve the manpower issues, the only solution to that if Europe deports all the Ukranian refugees back to Ukraine to force them to fight or we send our own NATO troops in (WW3). And if this keeps going the way it's been going millions are going to die and Putin will take all of Ukraine and not just parts of it that have been gone since 2014,
The alternative is Russia surrenders and gives back all the land they stole.
some of them propose some of that some of the time.
FYI that user is incapable of seeing any of the obvious flaws in the dnc. Especially if it is related to any of the times dems have compromised with gop on terrible bills or policies
He's actually for the horrid GOP bills when Democrats sign off on it. Or they wrote it because the same lobbyists pay for both parties. But horrid bills are good when Dems do it.
According to the dems never put out bad bills, only gop introduces bad things 🙃
Never ever, just don't ask who wrote and voted in KOSA, censoring American internet "to protect the kids".
Or voted for the patriot act, or Iraq war or more recently to not renew child tax credits
And they still don't understand ACA was rebranding of Romneycare
There's been multiple times the dems have capitulated in negotiations before the negotiations have started.
If there was no gop we'd still get terrible bills from the right democrats
It's amazing how the only period you ever reference is when with a short super majority only managed to implement Romneycare.
Biden was a moderate, Obama started leaning progressive but quickly ran to be a moderate, both Clinton's more on the right than moderate, etc.
Performative acts, like biden on the voting rights bill, they tried to introduce it and the senate filibustered and biden said aw shucks. No fight on any issues, no threatening federal monies to be rearranged to encourage support, no digging dirt and disgracing some of tje worst.
They do the bare minimum to trick people like you into thinking they give a single fuck about you. I'm sorry, but that don't. The Democrat party is owned by wealthy interests that unlike the Republicans are smart enough to give the working class enough crumbs to keep society from collapsing, but that's not enough to energize people to vote anymore because life just keeps getting harder and harder for the average American even when they're in charge.
All that isn't to say that people shouldn't vote for a corporate dem when it's that or a republican, but you're completely blind if you can't see that there are real problems with the party that are contributing to their losses.
Abortion rights (and everything else that was a constant campaign point for both the rs and ds) were hanging by a thread on supreme court decisions for years and years. They had decades to actually legislate them.
2010 was 15 years ago, They haven't done or said shit Since then on healthcare, and what they ended up producing was a fucking handjob to the insurance companies. They refuse to confront drug companies, Healthcare companies, or trusts operating in every sector of the economy.
That ignores them not fighting, so long after the fact I do not care to describe once again what I mean by that, but I should not have to describe to you how to play politics. We need strong leadership and we have not had that.
Everything continued to get worse so why don't you give it a rest. If pretending like these Democrats were doing a good job worked we wouldn't be in this position. Stop trying to bully everybody into anything like this is an acceptable job.
Did you read the article? Or even pay attention to the democratic platform since fdr?
Not a single one of those Democrats confronted any of the business interests cheating us and violating antitrust laws, from drug companies and health insurance all the way to meat packing companies and other agribusiness.
No they won't, you can't expect them to read things their mind disagrees with.
They've been moderates the entire time
Democrats are moderate in the sense that if republicans did not exist it would quickly split into a more classically conservative party and a moderately progressive party.
Name a candidate who is actually pro anything you said.
Yeah I don't need to talk to you anymore.
Now I really don't know what to think of that user