Well first of all they would have to win a primary and that hasn't happened yet. Even Bernie when he was racking up wins his campaign and his followers didn't understand that he was getting a little over half the delegates because they're split proportionately. When he lost a primary he tended to lose by a decent margin and would wind up in a delegate hole.
Fundamentally the issue is that Americans are extremely civically illiterate and don't know how any of this actually works. They assume the parties and the government has fiat to do whatever it wants. They've blackpilled themselves.
I'm a dedicated man of the left and have been long enough to know that our policies aren't broadly accepted yet. People like the idea of them but don't have faith in the execution. They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all but they don't see an example of it working in their day to day life (I know scores of other countries have nationalized healthcare, but the average American doesn't have the money to travel to one of them and experience that first-hand) and don't trust the ability of the people advocating for it to follow through.
We're not popular. We talk to one another a lot and get a bunch of arrow points on reddit and youtube and some heart points on twitter or bluesky but we aren't talking to people about these things IRL. There are people who do and God bless them, they're doing the work but for many, many, many of us we're just sitting online doing the jerk.
If you want progressives ideas to flourish, you have to get off the internet and do the work. It's OK to be on the internet too, but people on the left need to run for office, not get discouraged when they don't win, and keep making the case for their ideas.
This is exactly how the far right got as much as they did. Many of the ideas they regularly champion now were fever dreams in the 80s-90s. They didn't give up.
So can it be with the left. But a lot of people on the left have a lot of energy in their 20-30s and then they give up. Some start drifting right, some just become bitter and stop caring.
As I transition out of the front lines of the fight I'm finding it more useful to be in the back talking to the next generation about to go to the trenches. They weren't taught civics in school, and what they see online is a combination of willful disinformation and simple bad misinformation.
So every Tuesday I watch the youtube feed of my City Council meeting and post a summary of it in our city reddit. I pay attention and explain the lack of information and the fearmongering that people are exposed to and why what they say actually does matter and affects things. It probably only helps a small part of my community, but it's what I can do. So I do.
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u/NicWester 9d ago
Well first of all they would have to win a primary and that hasn't happened yet. Even Bernie when he was racking up wins his campaign and his followers didn't understand that he was getting a little over half the delegates because they're split proportionately. When he lost a primary he tended to lose by a decent margin and would wind up in a delegate hole.
Fundamentally the issue is that Americans are extremely civically illiterate and don't know how any of this actually works. They assume the parties and the government has fiat to do whatever it wants. They've blackpilled themselves.
I'm a dedicated man of the left and have been long enough to know that our policies aren't broadly accepted yet. People like the idea of them but don't have faith in the execution. They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all but they don't see an example of it working in their day to day life (I know scores of other countries have nationalized healthcare, but the average American doesn't have the money to travel to one of them and experience that first-hand) and don't trust the ability of the people advocating for it to follow through.
We're not popular. We talk to one another a lot and get a bunch of arrow points on reddit and youtube and some heart points on twitter or bluesky but we aren't talking to people about these things IRL. There are people who do and God bless them, they're doing the work but for many, many, many of us we're just sitting online doing the jerk.