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The Democratic party refused to understand that courting the right doesn't work, and now it's cost them the election
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Leftism
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I think centrism can win elections though. In my country, the UK, elections are usually won by whichever party captures the centre ground. Keir Starmer won in the UK this year by being centrist. Previously David Cameron and Tony Blair were pretty centrist, and both won multiple elections.
All western countries have right-wing elements and many of those elements in different countries have rioted or protested. In any case I still think it's true that a party has to appeal to enough centrists (e.g. independent voters) to win an election.
So you decided to hate me and the entire country I'm from based on the actions of a single person?
Surely it's true that in order for a party to win an election it has to persuade centrist voters, undecided voters, registered independents, etc. An average person who isn't too invested in politics.
I think a lot of people don't see it that way. E.g. there are many working class people across America who support Trump.
Maybe they could vote for the Democrats if the Democrats can earn more blue-collar credentials, and if they can paint the Republicans as the party of the rich. Perhaps the GOP is the party of the rich, but they now also have supporters who aren't rich at all.
Centrism can win in places that aren't America. Too many Republicans are being fed propaganda all day long by Fox "News"...an organization that has argued in court that no one should take them seriously. But that's where they get their news. They're also indoctrinated by their religious upbringing from Evangelicals. There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore. They have shown that they will vote every time for the Republican candidate regardless of how flawed they are. Trump is a convicted felon that tried to overthrow the government, has been found in a court to be a rapist, was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, has had numerous failed businesses and bankruptcies, has denigrated our troops. NONE OF IT MATTERS. Stop trying to appeal to the right and actually get your voting base excited about the policies you want to push.
I think in any country you have to appeal to undecided voters in the centre in order to win an election. So yes maybe the Dems shouldn't appeal to "the right" but they probably need to appeal to the centre.
There is no center in the US. If you're okay voting for Donald Trump, you are not in the center. That's entirely the point.
About the same number of people voted for Trump in the last two elections (about 74 million people) while the Democrat vote went down from 81 million to 69 million. So maybe some people around the political centre (independent voters, etc) felt Harris wasn't compelling enough.
I dunno really I'm just guessing. The Democrats will probably have a lot of data and exit polls telling them which demographics they need to do better with.
Keir won because the UK, like the US, has First Pass The Post and the Even More Far Right Party - Reform - divided the votes on the Far Right hence the Tories came second in lots of electoral circles were they usually come first.
Also I've lived all over Europe including the UK and New Labour is plain Right, not Center-Right - they only seem center by comparison with the Tories who migrated to the Far-Right during the Leave Referendum and subsequent Johnson Government.
Similarly by comparison with most of Europe (not the UK) the US is a country with only a plain Right (maybe even hard) and a Far-Right.
Curiously, both New Labour and the Democrat Party support the ethno-Fascist regime in Israel, something which I feel neatly underlines my point as from what I see elsewhere in Europe (with the notable exception of Germany) no Leftwing party supports them.
Maybe left and right are relative terms and Labour are centre-left within the context of British politics... but maybe this is the wrong community for me to say things like that.
Nothing left about them, Keith made pretty damn sure of it. The fact that you (and sadly many others) think they are though, is simply a demonstration of how the Overton gets shifted to the right by the establishment protecting its own interests, since they are who parliament actually serve.
Pro tip: the community you post in doesn't change reality.
The reason I think Labour are centre-left is because I think most people would think of them that way. I'm not trying to defend them or anything like that, I didn't even vote this year. I just think that's how most people would refer to them.
Or maybe the words do have reasonably fixed global meaning and only British Exceptionalism and their very propaganda-heavy environment makes Britons think their political landscape redefines those words.
Besides, even in Britain you might want to consider the existence of the Corbyn phenomenon (who, if I remember it correctly, got more votes than Starmer did) as well as the Greenparty (whose 1 million vote count went up to 1.4 million in the latest electing) as proof that there is in fact a Left even in England which is not just "What's in it for me?!" Neoliberals cosplaying as "lefties" by throwing some identity politics slogans and below inflation minimum wage raises once in a while, whilst de facto supporting an ethno-Fascist regime half way around the globe currently working on Holocaust v2.
I would say their support for the Neue Nazis and their pro-Finance politics (which I saw up close and personal having worked in that Industry before, during and after the 2008 Crash) by themselves are more than enough to place them firmly in the full-on Right field, possibly even Hard Right.
People whose guiding principle is "The greatest good for the greatest number" don't do what the New Labour types have done and continue to do, even the "pragmatic"/"moderate"/"center" ones.
Starmer would probably like to introduce more left-wing policies, like when he said a couple of years ago that he wanted to abolish university tuition fees, but Corbyn's election losses seemed to lead Starmer to believe that he needed to be more centrist in order to successfully replace the Tories.
Anyway I think most people in Britain and around the world would refer to Labour as a centre-left party even if they disagree with Labour's policies.
What would I know, my references are only politics in 4 different countries including being a political party member in two of them, one of which was the UK ...
Maybe in some countries they wouldn't refer to Labour as centre-left, but I think the majority of Brits would agree with Labour being called centre-left.
For avoidance of confusion, I'm talking about New Labour, not traditional Labour.
Fair enough. I mean I would definitely say it's true that Starmer has moved rightwards since he was elected as Labour leader, but I guess I would consider him now being somewhere in the centre. People on the right would say he's far-left I bet. "Two-tier Keir" and all that.