I’m skeptical of Cenk Uygur’s claim that 60% of the American electorate are progressives in his piece at The Hill. I think it’s more like a very vocal and local 20%. He’s outraged that Bernie Sanders is not getting a fair shake in the media:
The people on TV don’t like Sanders because he represents change and they got into their positions of power in this current system — and the last thing they want to do is change it. These television anchors claim they have no perspective. Think about how absurd that claim is. Of course you have a perspective — it’s just that you have privileged your own perspective so much that you assume that it must be the norm for everyone. In reality, that is the deepest bias you can have.
The New York Times and The Washington Post are arguably worse. Their core assumption is that maintaining the status quo is not a perspective, so it is the correct baseline by which to judge all other perspectives. Anyone who wants to challenge or change the current system is treated as a radical and delegitimized. This is a form of deplatforming. You implicitly never share the opinions you don’t agree with while never acknowledging it and pretending that your perspective is the only legitimate one. This de facto deplatforming is in some ways more odious because it’s done in the dark of night without having the honesty to admit it.
But I agree wholeheartedly with this:
Establishment Democrats are not progressives! No one fights progressive policy ideas more than corporate Democrats, especially Democratic leadership. If you think they are on our team, even though they oppose all of our policy proposals, you either don’t understand politics or again you’re so biased that you treat progressives as invisible, which is exactly my point.
which is very much the reason that I think that progressives are far less numerous than Mr. Uygur does. More than anything “establishment Democrats”, i.e. Democratic officeholders and bureaucrats, want to hold onto their jobs and that means nominating candidates who at least have some chance of winning. They recognize that, however he may fare in the primaries, Bernie Sanders has little chance of winning the general election.
The reality of American political life is that, although many Americans are not above snatching a $20 bill if it’s left sitting on a table unattended, they aren’t much interested in politics. Those who are interested are not representative and those who are representative aren’t interested.
Those in the media deal in simple stories. Winners and losers. Horseraces. Boxing matches. Nuance does not photograph well. The danger of a press that is in lockstep agreement is that they’ll force the real stories into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived notions. Nobody who doesn’t conform to that consensus will get a fair shake.
According to the most recent Gallup: 31% of Americans identify as Democrats; 30% of Americans identify as Republicans. (This is actually up for both since last month when it was 26% D and 27% R)
Most Americans aren’t partisans, let alone progressive Democrats. Uygur is one of those Democrats that supports running progressives against moderates like Manchin in Democratic primaries, i.e. the kind of Democrat that Republicans like.
I have not read the actual Mr. Uygur’s article, and this is based upon the two excerpts. Substituting Trump for Sanders, and many Trump supporters would agree.
Mr. Uygur should be able to understand that it is the Trump model that will get non-establishment Democrats elected, but most likely, he is too blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Doing the same thing but expecting different results is madness. I doubt that Sen. Sanders could be elected President, but if he is not circumvented from becoming the nominee, it will never happen.
What is amusing is that the Democrat super-delegates were created to override an unacceptable candidate. Again, Sen. Sanders may have won the nomination, but we will never know.
The first step in changing the system is realizing that there is a problem and, the next step is realizing that the process must change. The only way to get a progressive President is to nominate a progressive candidate.
There is an error, common among progressives, which Mr. Uygur simultaneously instantiates and contradicts: that Democrat = progressive.
One of the things that tells me is that he has never spent much time among blacks.
TastyBits:
What amuses me is that progressive Democrats have still not figured out that their most determined foes are not Republicans but the DNC.
If the 2016 election had been Bush vs Sanders, I would have voted for Sen. Sanders.
I can empathise with the progressives. In 2018, many of them voted because they wanted to have President Trump impeached. I disagree with them about Trump, but I understand feeling being screwed by your own team. (I want them to impeach because I think it will do more damage than not.)
I think that at some point black voters will wake-up, and I think that the progressives underestimate their hispanic support. Anecdotally, most of the hispanics I know would rather be white than black or brown, and many of them are racist regarding black people.
My impression is that Sanders (1) is not that progressive in terms of the identity-politics angle, and is more focused on economic class issues; and (2) is not likely to be successful simply through traditional electoral approaches to politics.
If I’m right, then the real reason Sanders doesn’t get the respect Uygur believes he deserves is because the national media are captivated by stories framed by horse-race narratives that Sanders appears incapable of prevailing given existing precedent. The national media IS mostly liberal, but more closely aligned with the economic interest of the upper middle class, and privilege stories about social identity that percolate up from social media.
What in the H does “progressive” even mean? Gradual improvement to the human condition? I guess not. Progressive now seems to mean an ever expanding number of genders and sexual orientations.
Of all the commentators on your site, Dave, how many have felt it necessary to explain their sexual activities? Or identify themselves in that manner?
Now, it seems that’s a prerequisite for “progressive” candidates.
Let me try to answer your question, Gray Shambler. A progressive is an individual who believes that human nature is infinitely malleable, history trends towards improvement, it’s happening in realtime, so fast you can see it, and there’s a moral imperative to help it along. Sort of a Whig on meth.
Like many of us, I am biased a bit by my own personal observations. To some extent I think it is good that we all do that as we need to confirm what may be dodgy statistics or just bad data collection. That aside, I just dont know people who live up to the characterizations of the progressives. Sure, I know some people who think diversity and inclusion are important, but then they think free college for everyone is dumb because we cant afford it. Or I know people who think there are way too many racists, and Trump is at least a race baiter, but they dont like socialism or they own guns or whatever. (On the other side, I know plenty of people who support nearly everything Trump says or does. We see that in the people who participate here.)
So, I am sure that there are a lot of progressives. I know they are noisy and have influence since they are very active. I just have a hard time quantifying them.
“The danger of a press that is in lockstep agreement is that they’ll force the real stories into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived notions”
What you keep missing is that news is a business. Stories about the extremes get more coverage. Trump is POTUS at least partially because he got tons more (free) media than anyone else, because it sold well.
Steve