Be careful not to learn the wrong lessons from Bernie Sanders. I supported Bernie because he was old school hard left and largely avoided identity politics and scandal. I'm not frustrated with 'centrist' Democrats as much as I'm frustrated with all the people who pooh-poohed me when I said that Hillary Clinton seemed like a sleazy person who had a deep closet full of skeletons. I was told that these were personality flaws I was supposed to overlook in favor of 'electability' even though I knew full well they were why she's not electable. I'm frustrated with the people who told me I'm a 'Bernie Bro' for having standards, and that my fundamental objection to Hillary is that she's a woman.[0]

Hillary didn't lose because she's a woman, she lost because she's a condescending crook.

- A Washington State alternate for Sanders who voted for Clinton in the general

[0]: In fact I found this latter accusation so offensive that I considered going full rogue and voting Trump.

In response to [0], I believe there are a LOT of folks who actually did precisely that.

And those people are exactly the problem. They are willing to throw away the Supreme Court, climate change, and fair immigration all over a perceived personal slight.

Your lack of imagination is not a compelling explanation of the political motivations of millions of people you want to pretend don't count

? OP calls out a specific motivation. The motivation of the subgroup references is very clear. It's you who is trying to expand that to a generalization.

OP et al assert a particular motivation of a general population, which is hardly not generalizing.

I lean left, but I'm highly disgusted by extremist leftist tacticts, exemplified by the fact that the media feminists can't even take a fucking joke (e.g. Justine Sacco and Tim Hunt). When you're so far left that you see everyone as the enemy, you're no longer progressive, but regressive, oppressive.

And when people revolt, you double down. As if you wanted Trump to get his second term.

The left is alienating centrists in droves.

Your social circle may be made up of extremists who won't tolerate diversity of opinion, but there are many, many centrists in this country and if this election does mark the end of the "centrist" Democrat, it may mark the beginning of Republican rule.

> The left is alienating centrists in droves.

It's the same thing that has been happening in Britain, where the Labour party as lead by Corbyn is miles behind the Conservatives (who in turn have made blunder after blunder).

In my circle of friends I've seen that the spectre of Nu-Labour, the very centrist version of Labour (often referred to as Diet-Tory) was responsible for the Iraq war. I know people that would rather back a Corbyn and his Old-School Labour, even if that means that Labour is less electable, as long as it means that their principles are intact.

Not saying I agree with that at all but thats what I see in a large circle of leftist, northern middle-age/class people.

Indeed. It's complicated; people are finally, after Chilcot, willing to cut off everyone who supported the Iraq war. It's a symbol of a particular kind of bad moral compromise. Unfortunately, it's compromise that won Blair his elections; he offered a middle-class, British-nationalist (remember Cool Brittania?) business-friendly Labour party. Which worked brilliantly until Iraq.

Corbyn is a disaster and has no new ideas - he's not even a reliable Brexitsceptic. His only advantage is being free of the taint of Blairite compromise. But who else is there? Possibly Tom Watson. Someone really needs to come up with a good answer to the question "what is the point of the Labour party?" other than "not being the Tory party".

(Don't blame me, I'm voting SNP, who give exactly the kind of reliable centrist technocracy that's extremely popular with actual voters.)

The SNP should set up an English branch of the party and try to run candidates across much of England.

It's a tempting idea, but the SNP are weakest in the Borders already and it would be a difficult message to explain on the doorstep.

Maybe they could change their name to something more inclusive, like the British National Party... :)

> It's complicated; people are finally, after Chilcot, willing to cut off everyone who supported the Iraq war.

This is not true at all, at least for anyone who counts when there isn't going to be a vote. The media and the entire consultocracy have rallied around the Blair generation even harder, and still have the bizarre fantasy that a David Miliband could ride in and save Labour. It's the same fantasist thinking that thought Clinton was a shoo-in and Brexit could never happen. Labour has no future as a moderate Tory party because the Tory party is currently a moderate Tory party. Labour already has no future in Scotland, and should ally with the SNP; that the Blairites can't see that Labour's last election in Scotland was lost because Dugdale was outperformed on every level by both Sturgeon and Davidson shows that they're living in a fantasy world.

Centrist Labour have openly declared scorched-earth war on the left of the party, and out of some misplaced sense of civility or ideal of compromise in governance, Corbyn won't do the same. He needs to use the power while he has it, and if the attempt is a failure, clear out and allow the centrists to do their unstained-Tory-governement-in-waiting thing until the next financial crash.

Corbyn's ideas are fine; from my (absurdly distant) perspective, what the Labour party needs are old ideas, not new ones. The bulk of the PLP seem to think that their only job is to listen to Tory proposals for cuts, counter-propose the same cuts, but only 2/3rds of them, scream that the Tories are heartless over and over again, and then abstain on the final vote. Corbyn is the only one offering any proposals that aren't slightly modified Tory ones. The problem is that Britain has one of the worst media environments in the Anglosphere outside of Australia, precisely zero mainstream outlets can manage to quote an entire sentence from him verbatim, and think that Bill Clinton telling lobbyists that he's a shabby "maddest person in the room" is an important news story. There shouldn't be secret PLP enemies lists to be "discovered." He should have proxies that are reading these lists to every outlet that will listen, every day.

No voters are looking for centrist technocrats other than the highly-paid professional service workers who the centrist technocrats are drawn from. Voters are looking for change from the neoliberal consensus. Labour and The Conservatives are completely weak, and in total disarray. Wait until your own racist reality tv-show host shows up, with a fistful of protectionism and an explicit platform to completely reverse austerity, steeped in racism and a hint of social conservatism. Britain is gagging for it - Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson - is Lord Sugar available?

Sorry about the babbling, but it just annoys me that people don't see that it's the left being marginalized by the media, not Corbyn in particular. Anyone who came from the left would have their mannerisms ruthlessly battered by the British press, and content-free constant accusations of "unelectability" and "uselessness." Eventually, a demagogue will come who will completely dominate the press through naked aggression, evocations of a better, purer time in the past, and, likely enough, an large ownership stake in the media itself. Then, we'll learn the lesson yet again that we should have learned from Western dabbling in the Middle East: once you've helped an oligarchy to eliminate all of the tolerant, secular opposition in a country, all you have left are the maniacs.

Again, sorry. The idea of ranting like this to a SNP voter is silly:) Just needed to get it out.

edit: There was 50x the coverage of a later retracted non-story about whether Corbyn could get a seat on a train than Chilcot, which had come and gone in maybe two weeks (after all of the wait.) Colin Powell was pretty happy about the priorities of the British media. Why would you relitigate some old pointless war anyway?

So the approach is: When running straight into the wall doesn't work (i.e. ignoring the issues and simply calling everyone "stupid", "racist", etc.), we must try harder (we must fight them)! Okaaaayyyy...

"Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake", a maxim attributed to Napoleon, works well for what I'll label as the Alt-Right here, defining us as those who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care" instead of automatic surrender.

John Stewart even made fun of this particular attack 6 years ago (http://www.cc.com/video-clips/m0pvy5/the-daily-show-with-jon...), and our principle easily extends to all the other accusations the Left thinks are still effective in their "fight".

Yes, we need more radicals of the shit everybody is fucking tired of. Do you want trump to win even bigger?

Trump didn't win because he was on the right. He beat the entire Republican establishment and the tea party rabble before he beat Clinton, and on most subjects he ran to the left of every single one of them. The shit everybody is fucking tired of is the Clintons, and their friends.

McCain: 60 million votes; Romney: 60 million votes; Trump: 60 million votes.

Obama: 72 million votes; Obama 2: 66 million votes; Clinton: 60 million votes.

"tea party rabble"?

Thanks for sharing that with us.

But he ran strongly to the right of the GOPe on:

Immigration

The Muslim subset of that

Globalism

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA)

Political Correctness

Related, respect for the Mainstream Media (we'll know he's really serious if he takes the advice to abolish the White House Press Corps).

Need more? I'm sure I can come up with more. But you're 100% right that "everybody is fucking tired of ... the Clintons", and after having them "live rent free in my brain" for 24 years (!!!) I'm profoundly glad Trump put them in the ash heap of history. Except I have expect Master Level Troll Obama (something he has in common with Trump) to not pardon them, to not "end our long national nightmare" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Gerald_Ford)WR... to them.

What those numbers show, at first glance, is the characterization of Bush 2 as an idiotic war-mongering chimpanzee has finally worn off in the forefront of the national consciousness.

That's a recipe for further division. We're going to end up with two populations with completely disjoint Overton Windows, and even worse, they won't be geographically disjoint. We'll have two choices; try to bring things back together somewhere in the middle, or bloody and violent civil war.

You sure continuing our mostly cold civil war isn't an option in the middle? What would spark the bloody and violent civil war?

Seriously, me and mine are prepared for one and continuously upping our preparations (note, those hold as well for many/most disasters), but we don't see specifics on the horizon, didn't even WRT to Hillary labeling us as irredeemable. What would be the Fort Sumter? Which, I'll note, happened over 3 months after the state succeeded.

Since I don't see any prospects for "try[ing] to bring things back together somewhere in the middle" after what my side perceives as an unrelenting and pretty much ever increasing assault from the Left for over a century (the Progressives, not to mention our latest reaction of God-Emperor Ascendant, excuse me, President Elect Trump (!!)), I'm really hoping for some sort of middle option.