If you want to know why voters voted the way they did you'd probably try to find a good poll of voters not instead search for the most exciting quote you can find from a politician.
Maybe Warner’s diagnosis of the 2024 election is wrong-but that’s not my point.
My point: it would be rather strange for leading Democrats to come to believe their party is being harmed by its own extreme element if that element was non-existent or completely lacking in any relevance.
He said "over the top" not "extreme". Those two terms are not synonyms. If you don't believe me ask your favorite LLM.
Maybe you think he meant "extreme" and was using a euphemism. But then we have a second problem: politicians aren't necessarily reliable for analysis because they can't necessarily say what they believe.
> He said "over the top" not "extreme". Those two terms are not synonyms.
They are different vaguely defined degrees on the same continuum; while “extreme” no doubt has stronger connotations than “over the top”, neither term has a precise definition and the boundary between the two isn’t clearly defined.
> But then we have a second problem: politicians aren't necessarily reliable for analysis because they can't necessarily say what they believe.
True, but I think you’ll find that in that soul-searching period which inevitably follows defeat, they have the greatest freedom to speak their minds and say what they really think, or at least much closer to what they really think. And the bigger the defeat, the more that’s true: and while November 2024 wasn’t that big a defeat in raw numerical terms, I think it was a much bigger loss in psychological terms
>it would be rather strange for leading Democrats to come to believe their party is being harmed by its own extreme element if that element was non-existent or completely lacking in any relevance.
I'm not surprised. It's a neoliberal congress ignoring a platform demanding increasingly socialistic ideals. We're not aligned at all.
> I'm not surprised. It's a neoliberal congress ignoring a platform demanding increasingly socialistic ideals.
I don’t think “socialistic ideas” are what Warner was talking about. I think he was really talking about social and cultural issues. If you look at antiwoke Marxists such as Adolph L Reed Jr and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International, you’ll find they’d agree with a lot of Warner’s criticisms of “wokeism”, even as they condemn Warner himself as a member of the capitalist class (with a net worth over $200 million, he’s the second richest US Senator)
> I don’t think “socialistic ideas” are what Warner was talking about.
He isn't, but my main point is that a lot of congress's represenatives are not aligned with what their people want to begin with. As neoliberals they do support hypercapitalistic ideas as well as deregulation. Which is the opposite of what many in their voterbase want in terms of better governmental support and proper worker protections. I'm not really focusing on the "woke" part beyond "If they aren't harming anyone, just let people live how they want, please".
