Part of the what’s going on here is that is using “left” to mean progressive. Meanwhile the left that is referring to constitutes about 15 people in the entire US.
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My guess is that the vast majority of self identified leftists in the US are progressives or just use it to mean “very liberal”
I dunno, I met a lot of people in San Francisco who were really mad about things like this, and they mostly struck me as pretty progressive. It was much harder to find anyone happy about the process, including the politicians notionally behind it!
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I think the point is Democrats should stop listening to those 15 people, despite what campaign contributions they may be capable of making.
It’s describing the worldview of the most successful “left” candidate in the past fifty years of American politics!
I don't think the groups are just 15 people if you include say a large swathe of affluent home owners for example.
I'd like to think there is in fact a left that isn't reducible to progressive NGOs.
Sure. What you’d like to think is different than what’s reality though, right?
Left has too mean something at least the person has a some skepticism over private property and wants to optimize for society over individual or family.
Too liberal should mean someone who read too much Stewart Mill and Rawls. Probably I'd call the Jacobins too liberals.
Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud: they want to lock Trump up and throw away the key.
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Exactly. There is no left in the US. Matt means conservatives vs alt right wingnuts (GOP).
Left: Single payer healthcare, mandatory civic service, state owned companies, gov suppressing small business, free college, ethnic cleansing.
I'm a foreigner in a foreign land and I have to tell you that when Americans use the terms "left" and "right" on the internet it conveys zero information. I feel like telling people, "Just say who you mean" but that's not the point. If it was, they'd communicate clearly.
Inviting a pedantic discussion about historical progressivism vs the rise of the New Left. Much of what we call progressive now is better attributed to the latter
I think is more usefully accurate here
matty’s response doesn’t really make any sense because lakshya’s thread has little to do with progressivism
the complete stalemate of the democratic party is the largest barrier to progressive policy goals, because even when those are the dems goals, they still don’t materialize
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I send this message from behind walls that separate worlds.
I don’t have much left but I try to extend my hand into the deep void in front of me.
We’re always encouraged by an enigmatic force to do that; don’t you agree?
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Reading over ’s thread (which I also agree is good), and its hard for me to make a ton of sense of MattY’s response. The breadth of issues pointed out in that thread seem hard to stuff into the “too far left” box. “Institutionalism is its own axis” seems correct to me
We will find out if it is more than 15 when Ezra comes to SF for his book tour in spring 
Yeah I agree. From the POV of building a stronger New Left, I think Yglesias’ political instincts are directionally more correct. I’m worried there’s even more policy wonkery in this new BluSky Dem iteration than before. Vibes, comms, and better outgroup selection matter more.
They are somehow both using crazy definitions, imo. Matt is blaming things like wanting community engagement for governance that have majority support of all voters on "the left." And agreed the Ezra Klein needs to get offline to understand the actual left.
all three are talking past each other and responding to different random things in jain’s post, which was simply a repeat of something klein himself said days ago “i just want things to work”
getting into the weeds of progressive and left and 15 ppl and donors-unnecessary here
Taking the over on your 15 and the the under on your estimate of the number of ideologically coherently committed Americans
While the press is ginning up fears, ICE really won’t be doing much differently than it did under not only the first Trump administration, but Obama as well.
Joe Biden’s limited immigration enforcement regime was the outlier.
Not at all, Ezra is spot on here! Defending government institutions ended up being like the main theme of Harris' campaign even as it tried to code itself as "triangulating". This is a serious problem and requires us to think outside of the traditional left right axis.
Matt is pointing to build-nothing older progressives to smear younger YIMBY-trending progressives in favor of the entrenched center of the Ds, which are also mostly do-nothing-ers.
Scott Wiener and Alex Lee are further left than Matt, but are the legislators doing what Ezra asks
Both Matt and Ezra seem to have a weird habit of treating the capital L Left as a more powerful faction than they are in real life, perhaps out of 2016 ptsd when they rode Hillary Clinton all the way to zero.
Yglesias is obviously wrong, he’s just using his standard “Dems are too far left” that he uses for everything.
Especially after it came out that he got Biden’s cognitive issues wrong, and admitted as much, why are we taking this guy seriously?
Liberal legislators in CA *are* the status quo-oriented faction. They’re rich establishment prosecutors, real estaters & corporate types, not socialists. People call them left because they talk woke when it’s cheap to do so & craft Byzantine regs to avoid confronting root causes.
Matt means "people online he doesn't like" evidenced by having more smoke for the ACLU than the crypto lobby or his buddy Shor wielding a billion dollar PAC to failure.
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serious question, is this some kind of shakedown
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