• Sunshine (she/her)@lemmy.caOP
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    16 days ago

    Progressives are separate from tankies. You can have leftist ideals without supporting authoritarians.

    You must understand that under first-past-the-post the party that receives the most criticism tends to lose. It’s much easier to pressure democrats into doing the right thing then with republicans.

    • streetfestival@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      No one calls themselves a tankie. It is a pejorative term for a progressive. It is used to silence legitimate criticism and helps right-shift politics

      (Edit: I think your frustration is really more with the mainstream media and what news they choose to cover and amplify)

    • Count042@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      There was a lot of pressure for the most banal, milquetoast, form of representation ever in the form of having a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic national convention with a vetted speech that involved nothing that would have criticized Israel at all.

      Even that was too far.

      Either the progressives are powerful enough that you have to take them seriously and give them concessions, or they aren’t and you get to ignore them.

      What you don’t get to do is give them nothing and blame them when you lose. Or, I guess you do if you’d prefer to lose the general over letting a progressive win the primary.

      Huh, funny that, who knew there is a lot of levers and controls that a primary winner, even one that lost the general, gets.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      15 days ago

      Progressives are not leftists, they are centrist liberals. No matter how many times Sanders calls himself a socialist, he is never going to call for abolishing private ownership of the means of production.