No no, that’s the trap of their narrative. “The Democrats are always just bending over backwards trying to promote minority candidates even when the deck is stacked against them, because they’re just such true believers in progressive ideals.”
The reality is, by playing up the “progressiveness” of a candidate’s inherent characteristics, they can be quietly used as a vehicle for conservative policies that make their donors happy. This is a strategy that’s very played out around the world, even Pakistan once had their own version of Margaret Thatcher, and Japan just go theirs recently.
From the perspective that progressive politics are completely off the table, picking a minority candidate was a tactically reasonable choice. A candidate’s race and gender are about the only “concessions” they could give to the left, while courting their donors.
But the problem with that is that second-wave feminism, the kind that tends to see Thatcherites as a win, never caught on in the US like it did in the UK, and third-wave, which is more popular these days, accounts for that failure and focuses more on systemic issues and policy than individual leaders.
But any strategy that might work to get progressives to bend the knee to neoliberalism will be tried again and again, and if it fails they’ll just chalk it up to sexism or whatever other bullshit.
No no, that’s the trap of their narrative. “The Democrats are always just bending over backwards trying to promote minority candidates even when the deck is stacked against them, because they’re just such true believers in progressive ideals.”
The reality is, by playing up the “progressiveness” of a candidate’s inherent characteristics, they can be quietly used as a vehicle for conservative policies that make their donors happy. This is a strategy that’s very played out around the world, even Pakistan once had their own version of Margaret Thatcher, and Japan just go theirs recently.
From the perspective that progressive politics are completely off the table, picking a minority candidate was a tactically reasonable choice. A candidate’s race and gender are about the only “concessions” they could give to the left, while courting their donors.
But the problem with that is that second-wave feminism, the kind that tends to see Thatcherites as a win, never caught on in the US like it did in the UK, and third-wave, which is more popular these days, accounts for that failure and focuses more on systemic issues and policy than individual leaders.
But any strategy that might work to get progressives to bend the knee to neoliberalism will be tried again and again, and if it fails they’ll just chalk it up to sexism or whatever other bullshit.