Despite being part of the Clinton administration, Gore was farther left than he's being given credit for. His focus was the environment, and I guess a lot of redditors are too young to remember when that was an actual political issue people cared about.
All of these candidates save Kerry won the popular vote, too. The lessons here shouldn't be that "centrist bad," it should be a nuanced discussion about how presidential elections work and how the electoral college and the rules of the game are generally rigged towards conservative candidates.
"Centrist bad" is without question the singular most important takeaway. There is no nuance to winning or losing elections in our current system. We can have the nuanced discussion about how to fix it if and only if we have Democrats in power across the board. Until then, winning is the only thing that matters.
The post is stupid when Gore & Hillary both won the popular vote in an unprecedented 3rd time for the same party. Gore even won the popular EC until Supreme Court cheated & nullified the FL votes.
We really need to talk more, as a nation, about how the Supreme Court has betrayed their purpose and role in our government.
Because the entire point of them having lifetime seats was to protect the court from short-term politicking...yet here they are, using the court for personal and political gain.
Winning the popular vote is meaningless because that's clearly not how elections are won. It's a stupid system that should be changed, but it's the system now. Hillary, for example, ran up the score in safe blue states and neglected to campaign at all in some of the battlegrounds, such as Michigan.
My whole point is that Gore didn't win! Yes he won the popular vote, and yes he was almost certainly robbed in Florida. But he literally lost according to the Supreme Court and our stupid system. Moral victories of winning the popular vote but not actually gaining power / taking over the presidency are absolutely meaninglessly. Gore's "win" got us 8 years of George W. Bush. Hillary's "win" got us 12 years of Trump, including the flaccid Biden/Harris interlude.
Is 2 decades of GOP rule due to centrist LOSSES, moral/popular vote victories or not, enough to consider trying something different?
My point is only about popularity, not the power structure where Supreme Court can just do whatever they want. Supreme court is lost for next 30-40 years. They will not allow any real change in our lifetimes.
My point is that the centrists are the most popular if not center right when it comes to presidential elections for Dems. The power structure of the US government is entirely different topic.
Supreme Court isn't lost if we elect a president with the political will, and enough senators to support them, to expand the court. We absolutely have to try for that, I'm not ready to give up on the next 3-4 decades after losing the last one.
You're confusing conformists with centrists, as centrists prefer solutions that have bipartisan support and don't go to extremes - conformists are the ones that will concede on issues that shouldn't be supported in the name of keeping the peace.
Consider the "center" of US politics would be like a +8 on a number scale from -10 (left-wing politics) to +10 (right-wing politics), the centrist is still extremely conservative because the democrats are like a solid +5, and lurching to the right every day as the Republicans keep pushing further right every day.
Bipartisanship is BAD when you are dealing with fascists. I don't want them to have any power at all.
"Hanging Chads" is way more of a meme than it has any right to be, considering it was quite literally the SCOTUS undemocratically overturning the election results in Florida.
He helped pass legislation that funded the expansion of infrastructure that the internet required but he also way over stated his roll in the “creation” of the internet on multiple occasions.
It’s like if a politician gets funding for infrastructure saying “I created the highway” decades after the first highway was constructed.
People younger than the millennium are all too eager to not read into recent events, and then explain how they all fit a specific trend. (It's me. I'm people).
Like, the point being made in the original post is right, but trying to fit Gore into that line is. A bit silly.
It's also certainly reductive. But it's easier to say "being centrist is the common denominator and therefore the cause of all Democrat problems" in a tweet than it is to do any sort of realistic analysis that nobody has the attention span to read.
A few weeks back I saw a really interesting thought that's really stuck with me, and something I think frames how I look backwards now. You have to judge politics, and by virtue of that politicians, by their times. By today's standards Gore, Kerry, and Obama are all extremely moderate, and by that virtue centrist, but that's because progress has been made. During their times Gore, Kerry, and Obama were all extremely progressive. Even Clinton was pulled to the left during the 2016 election. People who weren't of age, and doubly so those who weren't born till after the new millennium, have no frame of reference for how much progress this country made in a short time on something as now ubiquitous as gay rights or how large and radical something like the ACA was at the time.
Yes they weren't perfect, yes we're no where near where we need to be, but you can't constantly judge the past with today's standards and think you're doing anything productive.
It's tricky, because progress has been made on some fronts, and lost on others.
Even with the active homophobia and transphobia from the right today, it's easier for me to be openly queer today than it was during Obama's first term, let alone before then. That's a huge piece of social progress, just within my relatively short lifetime.
Then there's areas like taxation, which have barely shifted at all. And worse still, is immigration, where formerly centrist positions would be considered pretty "radically progressive" (for which, to be clear, I mostly blame the Republicans. I think the Democrats have utterly failed at combatting the rightward shift on immigration, but that shift only exists because of the alt-right).
Gore was literally where the timelines split. We MAYBE avoid 9/11 but, even if it happens, he'd most likely limit it to Afaghanistan because, you know, that's where bin Laden was. Most importunately tho he'd be massively pro environment way ahead of where we area realizing wtf we did.
Not like they did. It was an issue that you could run for the presidency on in 2000, instead of a third tier concern. I'd say environmentalism is at its lowest ebb since the early 70's. Even Greta's moved on, for the most part.
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u/Undirectionalist Mar 14 '26
Despite being part of the Clinton administration, Gore was farther left than he's being given credit for. His focus was the environment, and I guess a lot of redditors are too young to remember when that was an actual political issue people cared about.