I'm damn tired of people who claim to be the left

[Ken Burch]

281. What the hell is "trickle down social justice"?

You have been lying about my intentions here for months now, btw. Kindly stop.

I have never called for the party to be remade in ANY one person's image...It needs to be remade in the image of THE PEOPLE...the poor, the dispossessed, the hard-hit of all races, genders, orientations, creeds and identities. It needs to be a party that fights for social justice AND economic justice-two causes that are distinct, but related, and two causes that are not in conflict with each other on anything in this era.

We can't ever defeat social injustice in isolation. The Sixties proved that, once and for all. We can't fight racism, sexism, homo-and-trans phobia, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry while taking the side of the rich on economic issues at the same time, while refusing to deal with the sense of being cast aside economically that a lot of voters, including a lot of voters of color in the Upper Midwest, feel on a daily basis.

And the fight agaist social injustice has never been totally separate from economic justice. Part of the agenda of social justice is the eradication of poverty and the reduction of economic inequality to the lowest possible levels. We also can't eradicate white supremacist thinking without addressing the fear of want that market economics drills into everyone's minds. In most of the country, it is scarcity and fear of scarcity, as much as anything else, that preserves the tribal, paranoid mindset that makes working-class whites see everyone different from them as the enemy.

The base supported HRC, but that doesn't mean the base is anti-Left. The base is well to your left on the actual issues. They backed HRC largely because they believed she was more likely to win and because of her qualifications, and they had the right to do that. Some, but not all women, believed that simply electing a woman as president would automatically be transformational. They had the right to believe what they believe on that. She won the nomination and I fully accepted that, as you know perfectly well. The overwhelming majority of Sanders voters supported her. And the polls have continued to show that, whatever some parts of the base felt about the runner-up as a person, they were and are closer to his progressive views on economic policy than to her largely centrist-to-slightly conservative views on that set of issues.

BTW, I AGREE with you that nothing should have been said that even sounded like we should ignore the base(few if any of whom want us to be a centrist party)or should ignore racism. I've agreed with you on that the whole time.

It was a stupid thing to say...and there's no reason to be angry at anyone other than the specific individual who said it.

It's not the fault of that person's supporters that he said what he said, and there's no good reason to be attacking them for it. We need all of those people if we are going to win in 2018 and 2020, and we have no chance of winning them if we do what you want and adopt a "to hell with the Left" platform. People who hate the Left as deeply as you do don't agree with the Democratic Party on anything important, and there's no votes to be won by being as hostile to the Left and dismissive of what they propose.

Finally, we can't ever win another election if we do what YOU really want us to do and drive everyone to the left of Rahm Emmanuel out of the party. If the Dems do what you want and become a vindictively anti-left party, we will be stuck at 49% percent forever. It's not possible to run on a bland platform and win by default. Our only hope, in the "real world", is to actively mobilize everyone Trump is harming by running a campaign that promises to repealing all the ugliness and offering real solutions instead.