State of the Discussion

Yea to me the big miscalculation was indecisiveness from the Biden admin. If you're worried about escalation you start pushing towards a settlement in 2022 when Ukraine had a bit of an upper hand and was taking back territory. If you want to see if Ukraine can win you're way more aggressive with aid, let them take the gloves off, and push the Europeans to also share more advanced weaponry.

Instead we tried to walk a middle ground, let Ukraine lose all momentum, and now Trump is back in charge operating with malice towards Zelenskyy and myopia about the larger strategic situation.

That's probably true. All of the online advice (take that for what it's worth) to Zelensky has been along the lines of "Just pretend to suck up to him, flatter him, and generally pretend to like him and you have him in the palm of your hand." Unfortunately, Zelensky, pissed off after a 3 year invasion and stalemate, only saw the knife Trump wanted to stick in his back and lashed out.

Greater minds than I could see Russia's military capability being ground down in Ukraine, just as it was in Afghanistan, and we were hastening the process for a relatively small sum. Honestly, if the United States wanted Ukraine to win, we would have let them use the arms we gave them for offensive purposes from the get go.

"...online sleuths tracked Brösche to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, which is a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility run by the private contractor Core Civic."

"Based on that average, a month of detention costs taxpayers $4,900."

Mystery solved.

I haven't watched a SOTU address in years and I upheld that tradition last night. I like the idea of the president sending a letter to Congress as in olden times.

No single thing in American politics has warped the thinking of folks who think they know how things really work more than the fans of the West Wing who try to apply that show to actual electoral politics

Jane Coaston put it like this: The core of the base wants a leftist pro wrestler counter to Trumpler. He wants to put on a show? WE WILL GIVE HIM A SHOW!!!

And the majority of the moderates in the party still watch The West Wing every year and so they think that the solution is bipartisanship.

The editorial board is still going HAM on Trump. I'm still not sure whether this is in keeping with the new opinions policy, or a last hurrah:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/04/trump-tariffs-mexico-canada-address/

How tariffs will make America poorer

The president’s plans reveal an indifference to his voters’ pain.

One of Trump's instinctive political skills is that he attracts low propensity voters. One way that Trump does this is by making politics entertaining for people who normally find it a snooze fest. The liberal-left spectrum really doesn't have any counter to this because the entire idea of both liberals and leftists reduces down to make people more political than they want to be but a lot of people really hate thinking about politics and don't want to. But parts of the left have this idea that we can bring back the union hall while liberals think we can turn everybody into an NPR/PBS food, festival, and fabrics multicultural liberal by the right education. Neither are going to happen.

Well, it was a wrestling promo. He came out and said "These people aren't going to clap for *ANYTHING*" and pointed at the Dems and then gave the longest speech in human history in which he said stuff that the Democrats were never going to clap for, not in a million years.

He called his shot then made it.

It's like he read the first draft the speech writers gave him and told them to do it again except, this time, imagine the Democratic response to the speech... AND WRITE A SPEECH THAT WILL DESERVE THAT RESPONSE INSTEAD.

The great thing about opening with somebody getting tossed is that it effectively gives a layup to anybody inclined to play "whatabout".

He's doing a very good job of being hostile about 80-20 issues, 70-30 issues, and 52-48 issues. Even a 50%+1-50%-1 issue.

Some of the stuff like the McKinley/Denali thing or the Gulf of Mexico/America thing is silly and perhaps even petty but the comedy comes from being a president who changes it back. Can you imagine changing it back? Maybe you can imagine making McKinley Denali again (and perhaps even the Gulf of Mexico with a joke like "even the people who cheered the change didn't use the new name")... but he made English the Official Language of the US. Can you imagine a president getting rid of that?

It'd be easier to move the embassy back to Tel Aviv.

Tracing Woodgrains had a barn burner criticizing the playbook:

I defended this from leftist dismissal. I would be remiss, however, not to criticize it myself.

The problem with this list is not that it's moderate. The problem is that it's midway between negative and fake. Tailgates and gun shows? You want Walz to run more pick-sixes?

The last thing Democrats need is more triangulation, more focus-grouping, more chasing the tails of half-imagined Real Americans with superficial gestures. The moderates pictured here identified half of the party's problem: passionate Dems are too far left for the country. This includes the small donors, it includes the large donors, it includes the online base, it certainly includes the non-Democrat leftists who scream that what the Dems really need is more leftism.

But there's a second half of the party's problem, and it's a half that most consultants, staffers, elected officials & party leaders can't speak to, because to speak to it would be to damn themselves: most "moderate" Democrats are fake. Kamala Harris was fake. Tim Walz was fake. Joe Biden was fakery piled upon fakery piled upon damnable fakery, and he and those close to him dragged the party to the depths while they covered up his mental decline.

The whole moderate wing of the party has committed to a vision of Electability that involves dancing around their true positions, maintaining a map of careful no-go zones and forbidden associations, and coloring precisely within focus-grouped lines before letting their progressive staffers run wild.

Who could honestly believe Harris's pandering to the center after 2020? Leftists will tell you going on stage with Liz Cheney was a bridge too far; moderates, meanwhile, can't help but notice that Cheney was trotted out without policy concessions or without serious integration, as a mascot to smile about shared love of Democracy. Please. Superficial pablum.

I've hurled plenty of invective at groups I don't identify with here, so I would be remiss not to hurl invective at my own: this is not, precisely, their fault. You cannot expect people to honestly represent ideas they don't truly believe. You can't expect them to work with people who don't want to work with them. You can't expect to sit on the outside hurling invective at a group until they bend to your preferences.

What's a winning Democratic message? It's not just "reject far-left purity testing"—though that's a good consideration! It's not just "reckon with past failures of governance and focus ruthlessly on building institutional competence"—though that, too, is welcome. The party needs people who combine the authenticity and passion of its progressive wing with the care towards the median American of its moderate wing. Specifically, it needs people who aren't trying to feel towards the positions of an imagined Median American when they speak, but people whose own Sanders-like authenticity truly resonates with the median.

It's worth keeping in mind, too, the space both to draw contrasts with MAGA and to learn from it. Trump is apathetic towards truth—be scrupulous about truth. Trump is corrupt and self-serving—root out corruption and crack down on self-serving politics. Trump is taking a burn-it-all-down approach, so focus on building it all well. So forth.

But he, like Sanders, is almost terrifyingly authentic about what he wants, and people are hungry for that. Don't run from it! When he brought people into his coalition, he made them and their supporters feel genuinely heard, handing DOGE off to Elon, the Department of Health to RFK, and the DNI role to Gabbard. On one clear level, that sucks—but on another, it builds genuine support from people who felt represented by someone other than Trump. Dems can learn from that. So forth.

So what should centrists do? Be loud, be passionate, and be willing to actually get involved. Show up. Join the Democratic Party, go to local meetings, speak to liberals, make your voices heard. Learn from the passion of progressives, and recognize that really caring about something, and showing up visibly and legibly for it, matters. Don't sit begging for people to listen to you and for a party that doesn't authentically believe in your goals to moderate. Figure out your positive vision, make it legible, and become both useful and visible enough that people don't want to ignore you—even where they disagree. A political party is a vehicle designed for the purpose of winning elections, and the Median Voter Theorem wins elections. Show up.

Liberals who have felt cowed both by progressives and by a perceived need to hold a consistent party line, too, have a role: stop being cowed. Stop tripping over yourself to prove yourself to people who see you as at best an impure version of them, and speak frankly from your own position. Don't pretend at moderation you don't feel; be frank about your own position while being visibly open to working, and working seriously, with people who are authentically more moderate than you are.

As for progressives—look, it's not false consciousness. Your positions are not actually overwhelmingly more popular than everyone else's; the American public is genuinely split between Republican priorities and Democratic ones. Ask David Shor. But, as one example, health care reform - done right - is genuinely unifying. If you can combine reformist fervor with technocratic competence and deliver a health plan that works, people will want at least that part of what you're selling. Take an issue-by-issue approach, really seriously look at where you align with the public, and be ready to work with moderates rather than seeing them as less-than.

The future of the Democratic Party is not and should not be a future of focus-grouped fake moderation. It should be a wrestling match, one where people who authentically and seriously stand for divergent visions publicly work towards a shared goal of building something that won't just defeat the MAGA movement but will crush it. Do I want a technocratic centrist vision to come out on top? Of course. Everyone thinks their own faction is the best. But more essential than that is to at least have honest champions within the party, people who don't feel like they're just pandering to centrists to win elections--to have what everyone wants: a seat at the table.

It's not that this list is wrong, then. It's that it lacks sovl. It's full of "don't do this" and "don't do that," full of cargo-cult, focus-grouped moderation. You don't need platitudes about patriotism and gun shows. You need people who can credibly show how and why they love America, who can honestly fight for a positive vision they believe in, and who are ready to work with whoever is willing to work with them to achieve those visions.

Democrats don't need focus-grouped party lines. They need pragmatic authenticity. There's a clear road available to them, but they need the will to take it.

We'll see. One of those promises you're waving at was that he'd fund government on tariffs instead of on income taxes. So if your claim is he's going to keep his promises* then by your own reasoning the tariffs should be expected to stay.

*And boy that'd be a gullible thing to assume vis a vis Trump.

I agree, I hope the Dems are laying groundwork to field a candidate in every congressional district in the country and every swing states state legislative districts too.

From my perspective, I do think that there should have been a lot more transparency in the firings. Hell, even something like Hegseth saying "I went out to lunch with each one of these guys and these six and I agreed that they'd be happier at Raytheon."

But hearing that it's merely bigotry is much better than the worry that it was fascism.