I think the leadership is less socially conservative compared to the past, but they represent some very conservative bases so they more or less are having to crawl progress forward or they risk a schism.
The previous pope, Pope Francis, stacked the Vatican with more progressive leaning cardinals. I believe Pope Leo will be following in Pope Francis’ footsteps in terms of appointments.
That was the strategy in 2024, it failed soundly unfortunately - mostly because it’s not a compelling platform.
Meanwhile Bernie’s approach of actually selling a progressive message to voters in Red states has actually clicked.
He pretty much can’t, as Kentucky state law, from the 1920s, bars him from running in the general election.
He can try a write-in campaign for Mitch McConnell’s seat instead, which the article mentions, but he would run afoul of state law if he tried to run as an Independent for the seat he currently has.
Both likes and dislikes, imo. Bad actors and their bots can make it appear as though their stance is a widely held belief, they can dog pile dissidents, they often attack a straw-person for a point you never made to pull others against you and derail the conversation, etc.
With user level tools at your disposal, such as on BlueSky, you can at least coordinate a response to flag potential bad actors and even have the options to mute/block them by default. If your account were to be hacked and publishing disruptive content which was not something you would post, then your account could end up on these mute/block lists and you’d need to communicate the issue with the individuals that maintain these mute/block lists.
Manchin at least was a ‘D’ seat a fraction of the time, but instead it’s a regular ‘R’ seat now; imo it was a trade down. With Fetterman it’s just a complete waste since we could have an actual Democrat in that seat. I feel it’s more like a Sinema situation.
Sinema officially did a flip to Independent, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fetterman does the same. All the more reason to primary corporate aligned incumbents and vote progressives in though; which currently occupy less than five seats officially in the Senate and about 100 seats in the House.
What? First off, how is that related to what I was talking about?
No, what I said is what happened. Especially for down ticket candidates trying to play moderate.
Harris tried to walk a moderate line as well which wasn’t selling anyone on voting for her; at least not anyone that wasn’t already sold for reasons aside from her or her team’s lack of a compelling message.