The United States(!) of A

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factotum started the topic in Thursday, 27 Aug 2020 at 11:12am

Septic Tanks are going to Septic Tank

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basesix Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:28pm
sypkan wrote:

I don't even know how they can possibly make the economics of such things work - tickets weren't that expensive

true believers, and for the love. pat todd said it costs him about 10 grand US to come to oz. he plays the frandiego traps for 6 months to fund 1 overseas trip per year. he thinks we are cool, so we get the joy. supporting bands is often about that. keeping aus a grateful destination. (I got a coupla freebies on the door for test tube babies on the 19th if you feel like a run into town @syp).

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TimTam Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:40pm
Hiccups wrote:
indo-dreaming wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
burleigh wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
flollo wrote:

Burleigh, you’re spot on regarding this trans extremism. It needs to stop.

Please elaborate on this alleged "trans extremism". I haven't seen it personally. Seems like something made up by the same people that would've been scared of gay people in eras past, and probably still are tbh. wtf is trans extremism? lolol

Also, many drag queens aren't even trans. It's performance art, darling!

All I’m saying is there is absolutely no need for adult men dressing up as women and reading book to young children. What can’t you see the issue?

What about adult men dressed up as clowns. Is that ok?

That's not a very good comparison clowns have always been seen as entertainers of people of all ages and always focussed on kids.

I asked burleigh that so I could answer with some context about why clowns are historically wildly more dangerous to children than drag queens, which is why I had to make a more succinct post telling him to google Pogo the Clown.

Bro, drag queens are entertainers, and most entertainers enjoy entertaining kids. They're reading books, not simulating sex acts. I'm not into furries now cos I sat in Fat Cat's knee when I was five years old. Fucken loved Fat Cat too, me.

THIS.

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TimTam Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:42pm
southernraw wrote:

Seriously, what's wrong with you deviants?
I'm with Burleigh on this one.
Fark that shit!! Wt actual Fuck?

Oh jeezuz. You've turned sr. Don't tell me the trump thing pushed u over the edge

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TimTam Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:43pm
Hiccups wrote:
indo-dreaming wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
indo-dreaming wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
burleigh wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
flollo wrote:

Burleigh, you’re spot on regarding this trans extremism. It needs to stop.

Please elaborate on this alleged "trans extremism". I haven't seen it personally. Seems like something made up by the same people that would've been scared of gay people in eras past, and probably still are tbh. wtf is trans extremism? lolol

Also, many drag queens aren't even trans. It's performance art, darling!

All I’m saying is there is absolutely no need for adult men dressing up as women and reading book to young children. What can’t you see the issue?

What about adult men dressed up as clowns. Is that ok?

That's not a very good comparison clowns have always been seen as entertainers of people of all ages and always focussed on kids.

I asked burleigh that so I could answer with some context about why clowns are historically wildly more dangerous to children than drag queens, which is why I had to make a more succinct post telling him to google Pogo the Clown.

Bro, drag queens are entertainers, and most entertainers enjoy entertaining kids. They're reading books, not simulating sex acts. I'm not into furries now cos I sat in Fat Cat's knee when I was five years old. Fucken loved Fat Cat too, me.

Adult entertainers.

Can you give any good reason why their shouldn't be topless women story time for kids?

indo-dreaming wrote:

Adult entertainers.

Not if there's no adult content. Then they're just blokes in fancy dress as exaggerated women. A story as old as time (probably).

indo-dreaming wrote:

Can you give any good reason why their shouldn't be topless women story time for kids?

Not really, but it's a false equivalence, isn't it.

Your favourite team the Liberal Party had to be pressured to allow breastfeeding in public, so I should hope that you don't wanna see a pair of cans anywhere except the sanctity of your bedroom, preferably with the lights off.

AND THIS. Nailed it Hiccups

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burleigh Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:46pm
southernraw wrote:

Seriously, what's wrong with you deviants?
I'm with Burleigh on this one.
Fark that shit!! Wt actual Fuck?

Southern, we’ve come to blows but also agreed on a lot of things. I respect you brother.

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burleigh Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:47pm
TimTam wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
indo-dreaming wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
indo-dreaming wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
burleigh wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
flollo wrote:

Burleigh, you’re spot on regarding this trans extremism. It needs to stop.

Please elaborate on this alleged "trans extremism". I haven't seen it personally. Seems like something made up by the same people that would've been scared of gay people in eras past, and probably still are tbh. wtf is trans extremism? lolol

Also, many drag queens aren't even trans. It's performance art, darling!

All I’m saying is there is absolutely no need for adult men dressing up as women and reading book to young children. What can’t you see the issue?

What about adult men dressed up as clowns. Is that ok?

That's not a very good comparison clowns have always been seen as entertainers of people of all ages and always focussed on kids.

I asked burleigh that so I could answer with some context about why clowns are historically wildly more dangerous to children than drag queens, which is why I had to make a more succinct post telling him to google Pogo the Clown.

Bro, drag queens are entertainers, and most entertainers enjoy entertaining kids. They're reading books, not simulating sex acts. I'm not into furries now cos I sat in Fat Cat's knee when I was five years old. Fucken loved Fat Cat too, me.

Adult entertainers.

Can you give any good reason why their shouldn't be topless women story time for kids?

indo-dreaming wrote:

Adult entertainers.

Not if there's no adult content. Then they're just blokes in fancy dress as exaggerated women. A story as old as time (probably).

indo-dreaming wrote:

Can you give any good reason why their shouldn't be topless women story time for kids?

Not really, but it's a false equivalence, isn't it.

Your favourite team the Liberal Party had to be pressured to allow breastfeeding in public, so I should hope that you don't wanna see a pair of cans anywhere except the sanctity of your bedroom, preferably with the lights off.

AND THIS. Nailed it Hiccups

Are you and hiccups the same moronic person? Surely 2 people on swellnet can’t be that cooked

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Supafreak Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:48pm
Supafreak wrote:

Interesting story about Lady MAGA ……..,,,, Woods has also used his social media channels to echo the new conservative talking points against erstwhile allies. “Gays need to reclaim being JUST gay,” he tweeted last May. “We’re not ‘LGBTQIAXYZ’ groomers.” Recently Woods became an “ambassador” for Gays Against Groomers, a reactionary group that says it “opposes the sexualization and indoctrination of children,” which it claims includes “drag queen story hours”; “the transitioning and medicalization of minors”; and “gender theory being taught in the classroom.” https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/lady-maga-loneli.... Ladies & Gentlemen , introducing…………… Danny La Tramp IMG-9420

In August, 2019, Lady MAGA was born. “I am a political drag queen,” Woods announced. “I support President Trump, and I believe that together we can make America gay, I mean great again!”

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TimTam Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:53pm
velocityjohnno wrote:

Glad I got that in before the thread gets locked.

Haha. Nicely played. Bad Fat Cat!

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burleigh Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 9:58pm
TimTam wrote:
velocityjohnno wrote:

Glad I got that in before the thread gets locked.

Haha. Nicely played. Bad Fat Cat!

Word of advice timtam. Don’t let grown adult men dress up in women’s clothes, act like queens and read books to your kids. The world will be a better place.

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velocityjohnno Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 10:00pm

And one for Indo, the most exciting part of the show:

TimTam's picture
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TimTam Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 10:08pm
burleigh wrote:
TimTam wrote:
velocityjohnno wrote:

Glad I got that in before the thread gets locked.

Haha. Nicely played. Bad Fat Cat!

Word of advice timtam. Don’t let grown adult men dress up in women’s clothes, act like queens and read books to your kids. The world will be a better place.

Honestly burley yr such a... well there's no adjective that really captures your stupidity.
Yeah man, they're grooming yr kids man, haven't you noticed yr boy wants to wear dresses all of a sudden?? You do realise that some kids have trouble identifying with genders for whatever reason. None of yr business, but if you don't like it keep yr kid away from it. Kid's main influence are the parents. Just be happy yr boy will grow up tough and ignorant and wearing pants like his old man.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_Queen_Story_Hour
The world is a complex place not some binary fantasyland where men are men blahblah. There's no black and white except in your blinkered vision. Grow up and accept difference. Don't let yr kid go to story hour... there all fixed for ya dopey.

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basesix Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 10:25pm

didn't you call @burleigh a poof, @Tim, cos he says 'babe' in jest to @roadkill sometimes? Why do you need the @burleighs of this world to get onboard your/our particular train?

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Mal Caithness1 Saturday, 16 Nov 2024 at 11:08pm

This thread has warped to this ?
Now realise why most contributors comment under pseudonym's & aliases.
Outta my depth amongst the majority & commend the minority in their plight to bring some balance. Too many Knockem Down Clowns & Whacka- Moles here. Anonymity has a lot to answer for. Flim Flam, employee of the month.

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Supafreak Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 9:24am
TimTam's picture
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TimTam Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 9:49am

Stunet censoring again. Guess I'll come back again later. Cheers fascists.

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TimTam Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 9:52am
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TimTam Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 9:55am

Funny. Everytime stunet censors he censors a post of rationality. What's the problem stunet? Don't like free speech when it's reasonable?

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AlfredWallace Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 10:17am

Tim Tam. Hi.

Have you got a bit of a Tammy ache ?

Ta Ta .

AW

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Supafreak Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 11:29am

A close advisor that has nearly 10,000 coins , nothing to see here . https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/16/we-need-change-te...

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burleigh Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 11:31am
Supafreak wrote:

A close advisor that has nearly 10,000 coins , nothing to see here . https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/16/we-need-change-te...

What's your point?

TimTam's picture
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TimTam Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 12:22pm
burleigh wrote:
Supafreak wrote:

A close advisor that has nearly 10,000 coins , nothing to see here . https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/16/we-need-change-te...

What's your point?

Aaaand this is why yr an idiot

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velocityjohnno Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 2:21pm

basesix's picture
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basesix Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 2:40pm

don't do it, @vj... stay with us. step away from the green light..

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Jelly Flater Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 2:55pm

;)

https://m.

&pp=ygULQWxpZW4gZnVubnk%3D

andy-mac's picture
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andy-mac Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 3:23pm

Interesting times just getting more interesting....

https://m.

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basesix Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 3:27pm

don't do it, @andy-mac... stay with us. step away from the green light..

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basesix Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 3:41pm

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stunet Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 4:13pm

A literal interpretation of The Free Press for tight-arses who like a historical hot take.

The History Lesson Democrats Can’t Afford to Forget

Forty years ago the party was in the political wilderness. Then a band of centrist insurgents took on the left wing—and got Clinton in the White House.
Eli Lake

Well, that was a thumping, wasn’t it? Even optimistic MAGA fans didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote, taking control of the Senate and the House, and sweeping all seven swing states. He came within five points of taking New Jersey! Exit polls showed more than half of Latino men voting for him!

The results are devastating for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrats: They lost the nation. So what on earth do they do next?

One approach would be to repeat what they’ve been doing. Resist! It’s what they chose the last time Trump won. In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. There had never been a president so immune to normal analysis, and, as such, so unpredictable. Each time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms—and Democrats responded in kind. Being an opposition party was not enough, they believed. Instead, they would fight his very legitimacy. They built this idea of resistance into their very fabric, and it infected every aspect of progressive society—from raging late-night talk show hosts to left-wing prosecutors determined to put Trump in prison.

But while the Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately failed. Democrats spent nearly a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat to the republic. And what happened? Americans from all walks of life voted for him in overwhelming numbers. The Democrats wanted to erase Trump from the political scene; instead he now controls it.

Perpetual outrage was not the path to power. Let’s be honest, it was a total disaster: The resistance pulled on pink hats, and hollered about fascism—and then gasped with shock when the nation chose Trump again.

Democrats Have Recovered from Worse Defeats

So the party is in a pickle. If the Democrats want a shot at winning in 2028, then they need a new direction. Losing parties survive by figuring out why they lost and trying something different next time. In the meantime, they take incremental wins when they can. They act like an opposition, not a resistance.

The good news for Democrats is that they’ve been here before. Forty years ago, a few centrist renegades mapped out a course that eventually saved the party from oblivion. If you are devastated over last week’s electoral blowout, well, Trump’s victory was a squeaker compared to Ronald Reagan’s landslide over Walter Mondale in 1984. The Democrats were not just in disarray, they were on life support.

It’s hard to overstate the scope of that Reagan victory. Mondale, who was vice president during Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, lost everywhere except his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reagan swept up everything else. A conservative Republican won Massachusetts, New York, and Hawaii, for God’s sake.

And yet only eight years later, the Democrats found their savior, a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton.

Democrats Were Backed by Special Interest Groups, Not Voters

Mondale’s loyalty to interest groups inside the Democratic party was his Achilles’ heel. Gary Hart, a senator from Colorado and his chief rival in the primary that year, summed up the problem as follows: “You have to reach [those voters] who don’t feel represented by the AFL[AFL-CIO], the NAACP, NOW [National Organization for Women], or the Sierra Club.”

But Mondale could not see beyond the demands of the noisiest factions in his coalition. His campaign attacked one of Reagan’s most innovative initiatives—research into space-based missile defense—claiming “killer weapons” would send the arms race with the Soviets spinning out of control.

And Reagan countered with one of the most effective ads in American political history.

Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?

Al From, one of the men who would eventually remake the Democratic Party, watched all this with dismay. In one sense, Mondale was an effective candidate. He unified all the special interest groups in the party.

Except for one thing.

“The only people who didn’t support him were the voters,” he told The Free Press. “And to me, that was a big problem.”

You can see an echo of that problem today. Here’s Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman from New York, on the 2024 election: “My basic diagnosis is that we have allowed the far left to have outsize power over the messaging and policymaking of the Democratic Party, which is causing us to fall out of touch with the working class,” he told The Free Press. “Particularly working-class voters of color who have been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”

A Centrist Insurgency

In 1985, the Democrats were a big government, soft-on-crime party, animated by nostalgia for FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s War on Poverty. The party functioned as a coalition of unions, environmentalists, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, women’s groups, peace activists, and other progressive tribes convinced that rallying under a common banner every four years was the way to win and hold power.

But they didn’t win. Between 1968 and 1992 the Democrats only won a single presidential election, Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976, following the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon.

The Reagan landslide of 1984 was the final straw for Al From. He got to work in 1985 with another Democratic staffer, Will Marshall, forming a group that would bring moderate governors, senators, and Congressmen together to steer the party to the middle. It was an insurgency led by people terrified the Democrats would never win the White House again—that the party would vanish into history, like the Whigs. They weren’t afraid to play hardball.

One of their first tricks was the name. They called themselves the Democratic Leadership Council, even though the leadership of the Democratic party didn’t like them one bit. It was an audacious gambit that catapulted them into the center of the political conversation.

“We were an entrepreneurial, insurgent operation,” From recalled. Marshall, his partner at the DLC, put it this way, “The Democratic establishment was not happy about the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council. And the premise on which it was based was that in some way the party establishment was failing.”

The first job for the Democratic Leadership Council was to focus on the Republican-controlled Senate for the 1986 midterms. And here, they had some early success.

They began to germinate deeply un-Democrat-sounding ideas. The DLC critiqued Reagan on his strongest issue, national defense. Instead of slamming the hawkish president for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, the DLC chastised wasteful Pentagon spending. They weren’t saying, “Stop building bombs,” they were saying, “You’re building bombs badly!” They wanted national service for young people who received scholarships. They became deficit hawks, a threat to their party’s big spenders. And on crime, the DLC—unlike the mainstream of the Democratic Party—supported the death penalty and more police on the streets.

Willie Horton and Sex Changes for Prisoners

In 1986, the DLC had momentum. The Democrats gained eight seats that year, wresting back control of the Senate. Eight of the 11 new Democratic senators had run as DLC Democrats. From and Marshall were ecstatic. After a strong showing in the midterms, the Democrats thought they were in great shape to end the Reagan era with a Democratic victory in 1988.

It didn’t work out that way.

The Democratic candidate that year, Michael Dukakis, the governor from Massachusetts, did not run on the interest-group coalition campaign of Walter Mondale. He ran on his competence as an executive.

But his party was still vulnerable to the taint of excessive liberalism. And it caught up with Dukakis in devastating fashion in a single ad. Produced by supporters of the Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush, it slammed Dukakis for a program in his state that allowed a convicted murderer named Willie Horton to go free on a weekend pass. He went on to rape a woman and stab her partner.

And again, we see an echo in 2024, in the commercial attacking Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” that ended with the tagline, “Kamala's for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Harris did not campaign on gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. She ran on keeping abortion legal in all 50 states and on Trump’s unfitness for office. But her past position as a senator from California and her ill-fated primary run in 2019 allowed the Trump campaign to paint her as an out-of-touch elitist lacking common sense.

The same thing happened to Dukakis. Bush thumped him in the 1988 election. Another Republican landslide.

Bill Clinton Led the Party Out of the Wilderness

The DLC decided the party needed what From called reality therapy.

“Over the 1980s, the Democrats lost the three elections in landslides that were greater than any party has ever lost in history, in terms of the Electoral College,” From recalled. (In addition to the Dukakis and Mondale losses, Carter had been crushed by Reagan in 1980.) “If you continue doing that, that's the definition of insanity.”

After three election fiascoes, the Democrats were ready for a change and the DLC was there to offer exactly that, and they had a secret weapon—maybe the greatest political athlete of the last 50 years: Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama and Reagan were outstanding orators, but no one combined the abilities to think like a policy wonk and to sell those policies to everyday people like Clinton. At a time when his party was wary of the police, Clinton would just amble up to cops and ask them about their jobs. He was obsessed with making schools better and could talk for hours about it. And he had a knack for presenting center-right ideas in the language of folksy liberalism. After all, it was Bill Clinton who promised and delivered the end of welfare as we knew it.

Clinton’s ideas didn’t come out of the vapor; they were honed during his time as the chairman of the DLC. And in that role, Clinton in some ways began his campaign before his announcement. He would travel throughout the country to spread the gospel of the new Democrats.

From explained that a core value of the DLC was to distinguish between equal opportunity, which these new Democrats favored, and equal outcomes, which they opposed. “We believed the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government,” he said.

This did not go over well with other members of the party’s core coalition. And at the top of that list was Jesse Jackson, who was—like Clinton—a great talker. In 1990, he sought to kill the DLC with kindness. He asked to speak at the group’s convention that year in New Orleans, where he delivered a speech in which he claimed the DLC and his Rainbow Coalition had similar agendas. “We are delighted to be united,” he said.

This was a poison pill, because in 1990 the DLC’s mission was to distinguish itself from the kind of identity politics Jackson championed. Jackson believed the Democratic Party was a big tent of different minorities. He wanted equality of outcomes.

Going into the 1992 election year, the relationship between the New Democrats and Jackson was frayed. It was about to get worse. After Clinton survived the first of many sex scandals in his career, he came in second in the New Hampshire primary and pronounced himself the Comeback Kid. He would go on to vanquish his primary opponents, and as he was preparing for the general election, Clinton decided to deliver a little payback to Reverend Jackson.

Clinton addressed Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 12, 1992, five weeks after the Los Angeles riots. Racial tensions were at a boil. The Arkansas governor focused on one of the young black leaders at the conference, a rapper named Sister Souljah. He noted that she had called for a day when black people should kill white people. “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them. Where are they?” he quoted the rapper saying. Then he paused and answered her rhetorical question: “Right here in this room.”

Clinton’s speech would come to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment,” when a politician rebukes someone ostensibly on their own side to appeal to a broader constituency. Clinton invented the tactic.

It was a masterstroke. Bush had been trying his best to turn Clinton into Dukakis. Clinton gave him quite a bit of material. For example, he wrote a letter in 1969 reneging on his earlier commitment to join the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Clinton was a draft dodger. He also smoked marijuana, though he incredulously claimed not to have inhaled. His rebuke of Sister Souljah was a kind of political inoculation. Clinton was not an out-of-touch liberal, he was a new Democrat, fighting for hardworking Americans who played by the rules.

This kind of politics had a darker side as well. Clinton flew back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a lobotomized cop killer named Rickey Ray Rector in the middle of his primary campaign in New Hampshire. Rector had the mind of a child. To execute such a person was cruel, even if the messaging was savvy.

Clinton would go on to win the election that year, ending the drought for his party and completing the mission of the DLC. One of the ways he was able to pull this off was to pick a fight with a pressure group that advanced a politics out of touch with the majority of voters.

Resistance Theater Has Been a Voter Turnoff

The value of taking on the left-wing fringe was one of the first lessons the DLC taught the Democratic Party. Torres wants the party to relearn that lesson. “The far left is pressuring the party to take positions that are deeply unpopular with the American people,” he told The Free Press, citing the ad about illegal immigrant prisoners and transgender healthcare.

“It was effective because it weaponized the vice president’s words against her. And the question is, why did she feel the need to ever say that in the first place? Because the pressure from the far left on center-left Democrats is overwhelming.”

But there are other lessons as well. It’s not just the substance of resistance politics, it’s the style that’s been repellent to many Americans—the shout-downs, the screaming, and the loaded rhetoric, all of it making the normal give-and-take of democratic politics impossible. Sometimes resistance is necessary. But few political disputes revolve around existential threats. Normal politics demands compromise, and that means acting like a political opposition.

To Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, compromise with Trump isn’t a dirty word.

“Donald Trump signed five of my bills,” he told The Free Press, referring to Trump’s first term in office.

“He's the president of the United States or will be. He was elected by over 50 percent of this country. My job in representing my district is to first do what is best for America. They elected me to represent them in what is good for this country. And if there is someone who is president proposing something that is good for America, even if it’s not perfect and I can be part of the solution, that’s my responsibility. That doesn't mean that when he proposes things that are bad for America, that I won’t speak out. And I think the American people want that.”

Clinton’s political strategy and tactics were unimpeachable (pardon the pun), but the substance of his policies has fallen out of favor. The Democrats would be wise to follow the DLC’s lead in tacking to the center. But today the center is a different place than it was in 1992.

The Backlash Against Neoliberalism

Clinton’s governing agenda planted the seeds of an eventual electoral rebuke. One of his big ideas was that the middle class and working class would rise with the tide of globalization. That worked really well in the 1992 election. But, by 2015, as both Trump and Bernie Sanders were energizing a new wave of populism, public perception had shifted against the neoliberalism of the Clinton era. In office, he celebrated successes like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the repeal of the banking legislation known as Glass-Steagall. These measures were fantastic for the coastal elites. But they ended up leaving too many in middle America behind. Factories went overseas. The knowledge class prospered while the working class suffered.

Trump just won the 2024 election, in part, by promising tariffs, the opposite of free trade. And his appeal to the forgotten men and women is aimed directly at working-class voters whose economic fortunes were punished by the globalization that accelerated in the 1990s.

From said the embrace of free trade and globalization was a successful formula in the 1990s. Incomes rose across the entire working population. “Our goal was to deal with the problems that we were facing, and one of them was that we had to grow the economy and we had to equip people to take advantage of that growth. And we did.”

Khanna, though, argues that elements of Trump’s critique ring true.

“Towns were being hollowed out,” he said. “We were giving condescending lectures for people to either train for jobs that they never had or to move miles away. And that was wrong. And I think the first thing a Democratic politician needs to say is ‘We messed up.’ ”

The key to success in the 1990s, selling neoliberal policies to working-class voters, led to eight years of Democratic rule; eight years of peace and prosperity. But it was also a kind of time bomb. The 2024 election in that sense is the bookend of the 1992 election. It’s the year when Clinton’s working class coalition became Trump’s.

The Path Forward for Democrats

That’s a bitter pill for Democrats old enough to remember the glories of the Clinton years. At the same time, it can offer a ray of optimism for a rising generation in the party. Trump’s coalition looks formidable after last week’s election. But if he imposes all the tariffs he promised, a bout of inflation is likely to follow. If Trump alienates America’s allies, he will make the wars he wishes to end last longer. Sometimes the best an opposition can hope for is to let the party in power make its own mistakes.

And that brings us back to the emergence of the DLC. They realized the voters weren’t buying what their party was selling. So they offered something else. Power is earned through persuasion in democracies, not through cosplay. So the party is at a crossroads: One path is the make-believe theatrics of the last eight years. The other is for Democrats to roll up their sleeves and offer the voters an agenda worth voting for.

TimTam's picture
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TimTam Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 4:26pm

So let me get this straight. TrumptyDumpty has assembled an A-team that includes 1) an A-G that is allegedly a sex traffiker, underage abuser and more than likely cokehead, 2) a Fox news stooge with no experience as defence secretary, 3) a head of Homeland security who apparently may be a russky spy but who nevertheless loves Pootin, 4) a VP who called him Hitler in all seriousness and 5) a head of health who influenced a Pacific nation not to vaccinate resulting in the deaths of some 80 plus kids.
Is this right? Is this real?? What Universe am I in? Bizzaro world??
This is gonna be HILARIOUS. From a way off of course...pity the poor bastards living under this mad regime.

sypkan's picture
sypkan's picture
sypkan Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 4:50pm

time to turn off the msnbc dude... even the most compliant of sheep have woken up...

or, alternatively, buy yourself 20 or 30 TV's, and set up your own little troll farm like ratings support network...

keep the misinformation machine on life support... for a little longer.. and maintain the rage...

#resist

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1857897129076777108

(option 1 is the healthier choice)

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sypkan Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 4:46pm

^^^

as one observant commenter noted...

there's largely unknown live streamers with a bigger audience share than msnbc...

it's insane the pull and influence that little echo chamber has

and, also unhealthy...

TimTam's picture
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TimTam Sunday, 17 Nov 2024 at 6:05pm
sypkan wrote:

^^^

as one observant commenter noted...

there's largely unknown live streamers with a bigger audience share than msnbc...

it's insane the pull and influence that little echo chamber has

and, also unhealthy...

Sooo, it's all bullshit then?? Haha.