Snowflakes. Groomers. Cucks.
For years the MAGA movement has approached politics the way a bully would approach a schoolyard, sparring with labels so nasty, they seemed expressly chosen to appeal to the kind of people who stuffed nerds in lockers in sixth grade. And for years Democrats, abiding by the mantra to go high, not low, have responded by trying to be the adults in the room: defending themselves with facts, with context, with earnest explanations that nobody remembers (if they defend themselves at all).
The problem is that taking the high road only works if politics is a sport played mainly by people who act like grown-ups, which it is not. And also: Facts and context don’t make for particularly sticky messaging.
Enter: Weird.
Over the past two weeks, as “Brat” and coconut memes have taken over the internet and Kamala Harris inches closer to Donald Trump in the polls, the Democrats have finally gone low, deploying a bit of verbal jujitsu so delightfully petty it might just work.
Obama v Hillary 2008 was over whether we do universal healthcare or card check to massively increase union membership. Name ANY serious non-Berniecrat dem who’s run on anything anywhere near that scale in terms of moving progress forward since then.
And here is the predictable moving of the goalposts. Now the bar isn’t that Democrats have no economic policy, it’s that the primary policies weren’t grand enough. Except in the primary that elected Joe Biden the major topics of discussion were just as grand and the super moderate who won still greatly increased anti-trust enforcement and canceled student debt. The most salient difference being the Democrats had a weak super majority in 2009 and the slimmest possible majority in 2021.
But anyway. Why do you use 4chan alt-right slogans as the core of your complaint, fellow leftist?
The paranoid accusations from the blue MAGA set are so insane. You sound like a crazy person. Everyone is a secret Russian bot or secret republican troll.
Let’s point that conspiratorial thinking in a more constructive direction. Ever wondered why there’s always a Lieberman/Manchin? It’s almost as if the party structurally figured out ways to not deliver on its promises before landing on just not making any, while enabling the GOP to structurally take over the court, rendering electoral politics moot for at least a generation… Maybe the secret republicans are coming from INSIDE party leadership, not the internet…