between the real alt-right, which are (as we've seen so clearly) Nazis and Nazi sympathizers; and leftists outside of the Democratic party such as the Greens and the Antifa people. I have plenty of issues with those people but they are not the moral equivalent of the alt-right.

very loudly on the internet and twitterverse.

I'm sorry I don't think it is a good idea to pretend they don't exist.

Here's a particularly loud example.

Media Failing To Report Hillary's Parkinson's?"

Link to tweet

Of course there are some fringe characters on the left; every movement has its share of nutballs. The point was that the right's use of "alt-left" is a disingenuous attempt to create a false equivalency between the violent white supremacists they defend and all leftists and progressives.

extremes on the left.

No one on the left calls themselves the alt-left.

...and it's total, fucking, bullshit...

There are Neo-Nazis, and everyone else. Hopefully that's clear enough for everyone here to understand.

It's a bullshit label. Hell, I'VE been called "alt-left" and everybody here knows I don't fit in whatever category that term is used to define.

I can understand the Republicans trying to scare Americans with misleading terms like Alt Left. I don't understand it when I hear Democrats (and DUers) using the term in a pejorative way to describe Bernie supporters and their political beliefs. It only helps reinforce the false narrative being put forth by Republicans-why do it?

It's just communism. The term "alt right" comes from what the right stands for, which is hierarchy of domination. The "alt right" is "alt" because they oppose the existing international hierarchy of wealth and want instead hierarchy of race and national identity enforced by violence. There is no such dichotomy on the left because everybody on the left -- really on the left -- opposes dominance hierarchy. Even communists oppose it it principle, though it has not worked out that way in practice.

Let the fascists use whatever language that floats their boat..ALTLEFT doesn't exist....it is a made-up term created by conservatives.....

If someone here believes there is an altleft -- let's define it...let's have that debate..but to me - it is just a dog whistle for the Nazis.....

My point was that we need to make a clear distinction between the tiny number of people who would never vote for us, and the much larger number who we could add to our totals and thus win if people in this party would only stop treating THEM as the enemy.

So Bannon coined or at least defined "alt-right". That doesn't mean that there's an equivalent on the left. It's just such bull.

Unite all who can be united against a very real and present danger. That unity calls not just for Democrats, it also calls for Republicans, independents, and others.

Our position should be "no enemies on the Left".

There simply aren't any votes we could gain but ONLY if we waste time bashing people who agree with us more often than not.

Those on the left who embrace violence and authoritarianism/totalitarianism, violent anarchism, and forms of demagogic populism that make themselves enemies of liberalism are not our allies.

They aren't the ones I was referring to.

There is a significant anti-Democratic/democratic left that we need to disassociate with.

They do us tremendous damage.

interesting theory

Made up meme by the fascists and bandied about by people trying to create division amongst democrats.

I'm trying make the distinction between people we could never make common cause with-and thus probably aren't even worth discussing-and people we could make common cause with if only folks in OUR party stopped demonizing them.

What would you suggest for an alternate thread title?

That would be my title.

Can't deny that some are called that.

"if only folks in OUR party stopped demonizing them..."

How horrible to criticize those same people who threw John Lewis and Planned Parenthood under the bus when the two didn't validate their little biases.

Thankfully, I don't give an ass's rat if I have anything in common with them or not.

Just asking...

Even Ken, no political soulmate of mine, acknowledges the truth of the existence of the alt.left.

The alt.left helped elect Trump. They are not to be ignored or wished out of existence.

Just because the vile Trump used the term doesn't mean they are not out there.

Let's remain reality-based.

how you present yourself as an authority without providing sources or links.

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The term "alt-left" as has been used by some Democrats and left-leaning commentators (e.g. Joy Reid, Josh Marshall) has nothing to do with progressive policies. It's about ideological intolerance. It's in response to the far left calling another progressive a "sellout" or "neoliberal" or "corporatist" or whatever. And the far left is the only part of the progressive coalition where I've seen this ideological intolerance.

For example, take healthcare. Some Dems are in favor of single payer. Some are in favor of expanding Obamacare instead. Both of those are fine views, since the goal of universal coverage is the important thing, and can be achieved in more than one way. Single payer versus other systems is a policy debate, and its a fine one to have, and there are arguments on different sides of it.

BUT, anti-single-payer Dems don't go around saying that people who support single payer should be booted out for their views, or attack them personally simply for supporting single payer. Conversely, there is a substantial portion of the far left that just does that. Anyone who doesn't support single payer is deemed "neoliberal" and "corporatist" and "sellout" and "scum" and worse.

That is the ideological intolerance problem of the far left, and that is the reason the term "alt-left" has been used, before Charlottesville, in the way it has.

whose only crime is to continue to support the values of the Sanders campaign and continues to work to get the Democratic Party to adopt all or even some of those values.

It's also related to the claim that people who argue for that are "refighting the primaries" or are trying to "take over the party and remake it in the image of Sanders", a phrase that implies that Sanders supporters worship the guy like a god, rather than simply displaying normal, healthy human enthusiasm for what he says.

People of good will on DU, no matter who they supported before Philly, need to be calling for an end to the internal war and and end to the false accusations.

Internalizing

To say that 'Nobody equates the two. Nobody ever did" is so patently untrue, and obviously so to anyone that reads this board...that's it's just bizarre and hilarious that anyone would attempt to make that claim.

only held by a handful.

Sanders shouldn't be allowed to run as a Democrat, should he attempt to do so? At least be honest about it. There are plenty of people who want to keep a certain brand of liberalism OUT of the democratic party.

As to whether or not some of us want to influence our party in a certain direction...well don't you? Don't you want it to be a thing that represents your values? The left-wing is hardly in a position to boot anybody out, and that is total nonsense to try to frame its position that way. It is trying to put up alternative candidates. Whats the problem there?

"Saunders shouldn't run here" is an extremely minority position at DU.

And on the claim that Bernie can't be trusted to be antiracist and antioppression, and worse, that all or most of his supporters have every shortcoming his opponents claim that he has.

We need to win more votes in 2018 and 2020. How are we going to do that if not only Bernie but his supporters are anathemized in thie party?

It's time for everybody here to admit, in virtually all cases, we are pro-choice, antiracist and antioppression, with equal passion, no matter who we supported in the 2016 primaries-and that nobody should be driven away just because they didn't support our eventual nominee from the instant she declared her candidacy.

who share the same core set of values. Lots and lots of noise these days unfortunately

If we get to unity, it will be down to the good work of people like you.

Thanks for what you do.

But we're under attack by the egregious right wing, we definitely need to stop screwing around. Thanks again for the OP.

Whether non-Democrats should be able to run as Democrats is not about ideological purity. It had to do with the fact that Sanders bashed the Democratic party for decades, even to the extent of saying it would be hypocritical for him to run as a Democrat, but then joined them at his convenience for a presidential run.

But nobody said Sanders shouldn't be able to run because he supports single payer or free college. Nobody has suggested that Elizabeth Warren is not a "real Democrat" because of her liberal views.

Yes, a lot of people want to influence the party in a certain direction, and that's totally fine. People on the left do it, and people in the center do it. But there are ways to do it productively, without suggesting that people who disagree are someone corrupt or sold out or "neoliberal" or "corporatist". This to me is the line between "left" and "alt left". It's not about support for policies like single payer, it's about the automatic conclusion that anyone who doesn't is a bad person.

And then, of course, there's the fact that a bunch of far-leftists refused to even vote for Hillary last fall, thus paving the way for Trump. There's simply no excuse for that. And it's no coincidence that it's generally the same people who toss around "neoliberal scum" at anyone who doesn't support single payer or $15.

Jimmy Dore, perfect example. And he's got an audience. And there are others. When he's not talking about Seth Rich, or Hillary Clinton having Parkinson's, his show is basically non-stop personal attacks on anyone who doesn't agree with his views. He doesn't challenge arguments, or argue policy, or accept that there can be honest, reasoned disagreements, he just labels people as sellouts and corporatists.

And it makes no sense to pretend that people like Jimmy Dore don't exist.

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see that here at DU. I've seen one that I sat on jury service for, bashing Booker, and that got promptly removed.

But it is a ridiculous argument to suggest that financial
connections should not be on the table for criticism. We can't ignore that elephant in the room. It does factor on one side of the equation or another. If it isn't affecting the policy decisions of our politicians, which, damn that would be hard to entirely swallow, it is alternatively affecting which horses the big money backs and propels to the top of the ticket. Either way, there's something the big money likes about a candidate, or really dislikes about that candidates potential rivals.

"A bunch" is an apt way to put that. I'd hardly put the loss at their feet.

Yes, Jimmy Dore can be problematic, (and edit to add that I rarely listen to him because of that venom). If you don't think the likes of Joy Reid's crusade against Bernie supporters is problematic, well then there's the double-standard.

But there's reasonable and unreasonable criticism in that area. I'll leave it at that, and its pretty easy to tell the difference.

Regarding Jimmy Dore versus Joy Reid, there's no comparison whatsoever. Yes, Joy Reid has been highly critical of Bernie and his supporters, but if you listen to her and read her tweets, it's clear by "his supporters" she means the vociferous uncompromising ones. She particularly takes issue (as do I) with the fact that the Bernie movement wants to remake the Democratic party in its image without actually contributing much to the organization, or even joining it.

Which, whether you agree or not, is definitely a fair point. I mean, the guy bashes the party for decades, then uses their infrastructure to run for president, then goes back to independent, and now wants to start setting litmus tests for Democratic candidates. It's not hard to see how people who have supported and worked for the Dems for years might see that as problematic.

But does she call Bernie scum, like Dore regularly does to basically any Dem who isn't Bernie? Jimmy Dore is a whole different order of magnitude. Played around with Seth Rich conspiracies. Not one, but two segments Hillary's "Parkinson's", going all Alex Jones style through the video in slow motion. Jimmy Dore claims that the chemical attacks in Libya were false-flags (both of them), meaning that US forces deliberately gassed innocent people in order to justify retaliatory strikes. And on and on.

So, no, there's no comparison whatsoever. Please.

in and were glad he was here. It's not being free loafer if you earn your campaign money the "honest" way I guess.

I wouldn't deign to take Sanders out of the context of his unique circumstances. Of course he had the luxury of being more "pure" ideologically than others, and that of course has come with, until his recent surge of popularity, the obscurity you can expect from a Senator who is at odds with the Democratic party on some sticking issues, and who is from a small rural state, so its no surprise that there's no effective third party apparatus to run with. What he has instead is a longstanding record of fighting the good fight and being ahead of the times. He was welcomed in because of his work.

We've talked about this before, and how absurd it is to assume that a party eschewing corporate money is going to somehow compete with the two standing juggernauts...ever...or certainly not without circumventing whatever propriety you think people should be following that would guarantee the status quo didn't get shaken up. Sanders shouldn't run as a dem to spread his message because why? Fairness?

but there's no such thing as him just coming in and coopting the democratic party's apparatus. That's the kind of bullshit framing Joy Reid has been doing. There's no votes there if that's the case. There's no support. Sanders got support from democrats and votes from democrats. That litmus test argument also continues to be hokum. It might be a standard for his endorsement versus for another candidate in a primary, which people have every right to have, but then we know who he endorsed come GE time. He can't and isn't trying to impose a litmus test for the whole party, nor is anybody who is not in the leadership of the party, because they have no power to do so. To say that's what they are doing or attempting is just dishonest.

And Joy has also thrown in for your consideration, that the reason people from the Bernie camp are hard on certain up and coming candidates is the color of their skin. That is an outright falsehood, again meant to paint the Sanders wing as racist white people.

without contributing to it the way other actual Dems have for years. And it's a far cry from "scum", not to mention the Parkinson's stuff and the all that. Plus I don't recall her saying that Bernie would be just as bad or worse than Trump.

Seriously, I can't believe you are even arguing that Joy Reid's comments about Bernie are even close to Jimmy Dore level. And the thing is Jimmy Dore is far from the only prominent alt-leftist spewing that crap. Remember HA Goodman from the primaries? You know, the Bernie supporting columnist that got posted here like every single day? Guess what he has to say about Charlottesville? He put a video titled "HEATHER HEYER BEING USED POLITICALLY BY DEMOCRATS: Trump Offers Condolences". So yeah. Go ahead and tell me about Joy Reid again.


Now as far as the substance of your rebuttal to Joy Reid, its arguable. Yes, he did get support from Democrats. On the other hand, he did bash the party for many years, and one of his stated reasons for running as a Dem was for the money and infrastructure, money and infrastructure that was built by other people during the years that he was bashing them.

Another point here is that some very prominent members of Bernie's campaign, including Nina Turner and Cornel West, refused to back Hillary in the general election. This is at least in part on Bernie. No, he can't control them. But, yes, he can surround himself with people who have enough decency not to help throw the country into Donald Trump's hands. Or, at the very least, make them agree to endorse the eventual winner of the primary a precondition to being part of his campaign. If he had the best interest of the country, or the Democratic Party, in mind, he could easily have done that.


But, this isn't really about whether Joy Reid is right or wrong. It's about the fact that alt-leftists like Dore and Goodman are at an entirely different level of destructive insanity. And they need to be called out for it.

And I would say that the people bashing Harris and Booker as corporatist practitioners of identity politics are the ones dividing the Democrats, rather than Joy Reid for calling those people out.

But right or wrong, her opinions fall well within the realm of sanity and civility, as opposed to those of Jimmy Dore and his ilk. And fair enough, you didn't say they were the same, but you did use the same word "problematic" to describe both of them, suggesting that not accepting that Joy Reid is problematic while saying that Jimmy Dore is problematic is hypocritical.

And here's the issue I have with that. If we calibrate our words such that what Jimmy Dore says is merely "problematic", then no, Joy Reid is not problematic, because either that's way too weak a word to describe Dore, or way to strong a word to describe Reid. If Jimmy Dore is problematic, then Joy Reid is swell. If Joy Reid is problematic, then Jimmy Dore is a sociopath.

Now, granted, most people on TYT aren't nearly as nutty as Dore is, but still, people like him do have a following. If DU is any measure of anything, he got posted here fairly often before the "purge", as did other equally if not more nutty people like HA Goodman and "Sane Progressive." So, at least in one online political circle that you and I both frequent, they are (or were) somewhat influential.

Especially in light of the fact that a lot of people get their news from Facebook or youtube now, I don't think the Jimmy Dores of the world can just be dismissed as fringe. I mean, Alex Jones is certainly fringe, but he has a huge following. Also, remember that at the convention last summer, a significant minority of the delegates were actually booing a lot of the speakers. That was in the real world, not the fringe world. Where did they get their ideas? Where did Bernie-or-Bust come from? It came from "fringe" social and alternative media sites, where people like Dore and HA Goodman and the rest are influential.

You're right that Sarandon and West wouldn't say all the things that Dore has said. But they'd say different, arguably equally stupid things. Sarandon's whole Trump will make things will "really explode" comment is for the record books. West's "n****rized" comment about Obama wasn't so great either. And all three of them endorsed Jill Stein, which in my book comes pretty close to endorsing Trump.

As far as Joy Reid, of course, you're right, she has much more reach and exposure than Jimmy Dore. And, yes, obviously she has been critical of Bernie and his movement. That in itself is not problematic, though. There's a difference between "incorrect" and problematic, and I'm not even ready to concede that she's incorrect.

I don't know what comments of hers you are referring to specifically, but I do recall her pointing out that it is curious that the left has come down so hard on Booker and Harris. But again that's pretty far from saying, in your words, that it "must be for the color of their skin". And there are a lot of dimensions to that. For example, one angle is that the Bernie movement is often suspicious of "identity politics", and that suspicion can bleed over into a belief that minority or women candidates are "tokens", potentially using their gender or race to appease progressives while pursuing conservative economic policies. In fact, we saw plenty of that during the primary when people would argue that all Hillary had going for her was her gender. Also, remember Bernie himself made that poorly worded comment about how the country had "overcome racism" and that people shouldn't be basing their votes on their color.

Another angle is that African Americans, and AA women in particular, are the most loyal Democratic voters, and not only did Bernie do very poorly in that demographic, but a lot of the rhetoric coming from his supporters about the future of the party talks about the "white working class." And so on. So it's not nearly as simple as "Bernie supporters are racist".

was going to run on economic justice issues and the values of Occupy. If Bernie hadn't run, those would never have been part of the conversation. The guy didn't even WANT to run-he'd spend months begging Liz Warren to get in.

It would have been intolerable to have one more cycle where the only message heard was "no change...keep it bland...keep it 'safe'...stay the course".

There were and are good things in "the course"...but we needed more. We needed, and still need, to talk about class, about corporate power, about the need to at least reduce the distance between rich and poor.

Had our fall campaign, whoever we nominated, incorporated the economic and class sensibility of the Sanders movement, Trump could never have carried the Upper Midwest and thus never come close to winning. We almost certainly would have re-taken the Senate and might even have managed taking the House.

Instead, whoever ran our fall campaign decided to pretend that the Sanders phenomenon had never even happened and had no real support.

What would our ticket and our party have had to lose by embracing at least some change? From embracing the economic justice movement as potential allies to be embraced rather than as something somewhere between a nuisance and an enemy?

What harm would have come of admitting there was need for a coalition based on partnership? Of trying to expand our vote share by reaching out to people we could make common ground with, and of trying to turn non-voters into voters?

I and the others who have posted on this since November have done so because we were shocked and horrified by the November result and want to make sure we never repeat it. We said them simply out of a sincere desire to help.

I hope the sincerity of that can finally be trusted.

But I do doubt the sincere desire of people like Jimmy Dore and Jill Stein and Cornel West to help. I doubt it very much.

I mean, in some abstract sense, I'm sure they think what they are doing is somehow driving the world in a better direction. The same could be said about Richard Spencer. But there comes a point where adults are responsible for what they say and do, and people like them and others who constantly told us that the "two evils" are the same and people should throw their vote away are morally responsible for their part in helping Trump become president. Hence my (and others') calling them "alt-left" (but I'm willing to change terms now that Trump has co-opted it).

Now, as to your point that moving the Dems left economically will/would have helped get votes, I'm not sure. I think, for example, running on single payer would be disastrous politically. Yes, I know the polls, but the reality is most Americans like their current healthcare, and single payer means not just a huge tax hike (yes, I know it's in place of premiums, but try selling that), but also telling all those people that they can't keep their current healthcare and will be put onto a Medicare instead.

What else? Minimum wage? I doubt that the difference between 12 and 15 would have made the slightest difference politically, and from what I've read it appears many poorer parts of the country wouldn't be able to sustain 15 without job losses. Free college versus free community college and debt-free public college? Again, I doubt rust-belt voters are sweating that.

Plus, Hillary already made a bunch of concessions to Bernie. TPP was a big one, and that was probably bad politically, since she was a proponent of TPP while it was in early development. It also put her at odds with Obama on the issue. Green energy and jobs programs? Both Hillary and Bernie had those. Etc.

The truth is, Hillary ran on a very progressive platform. She just couldn't escape the demonization of her, plenty of which came from the far left. I mean, it wasn't just Alex Jones talking about her "Parkinson's", it was Jimmy Dore as well.



But the discussion about the future of the party is a good one to have. What I object to is the reflexive labelling of anyone who, say, supports 12 instead of 15, as a sellout corporatist neoliberal. And, you have to admit, that doesn't happen the other way around. People who support 12 don't call the 15 people names, they just say that they thing 12 is a more prudent and economically viable minimum wage. But the 15 people (some of them, not all), have all sorts of nasty personal insults for the 12 people.

And that is why the term "alt-left" has existed.

It did that when her people on the platform committee refused to allow a specific "no TPP" commitment in the platform-replacing the position she took in the primaries with meaningless words about opposing "bad trade deals"-a change that was followed by Terry McAuliffe saying, on live tv the next day, that there was still a possibility of TPP being revived if she was elected. Those two events did massive damage, and I say that as a person who spent untold hours on social media, when not canvassing and phone-banking for the ticket all through the fall, begging people to vote for the ticket and having the TPP mixed message thrown back in my face over and over.

If she had stayed explicitly with her primary message on that, if she had even made a speech a month into the campaign on that comparable to Hubert Humphrey's "Salt Lake City" speech on Vietnam in the fall '68 campaign, Trump could not have carried the Upper Midwest-he took THOSE states, in addition to the vote suppression, because he was given a chance to win over working-class voters by making a straightforward pledge on that issue. Instead, the party ended up falling on its sword for a deal that ended up being cancelled anyway.

You are right in saying the party added a lot of Sanders language to the platform-but why, in the fall campaign, did the ads and the speeches not mention that she had embraced at least some of the Sanders message? Why, a lot of the time, was the platform barely even mentioned? Why were there not ads specifically reaching out to young Sanders voters, thanking them for making a difference and welcoming them to the party? Why, instead of that, was the fall campaign run in a way that basically didn't acknowledge that these young people had done anything that mattered? Instead of doing that, too often Sanders supporters were treated as though they had spent a year wasting their time and had not achieved anything.

I think that treatment, administered to those new to politics, those whose support we desperately needed, is what turned a lot of them into nonvoters. And the sad thing is, we could have done everything I listed there without betraying or abandoning anyone in our base.

We need to learn from this for next time.

I agree about the individuals you mentioned there-but the approach to take is to go after them as individuals-NOT to blame others for them.

I'll take your word for it that people brought that up in your canvassing, but the position of her campaign, as opposed to the platform, was anti-TPP. My guess is that the platform thing was because still-president Obama was pro-TPP and they didn't want to snub him. Still, my opinion there is that she should have just stayed with pro-TPP and defended it. Polls showed most Americans were in favor of it, and politically having previously supported it put her in a bad spot.

Really I don't know if the stuff you're talking about would have made much difference, but maybe. I think that to win she had to (a) be more charismatic (b) not have used that email server and/or (c) not have been smeared since 1992. Any one of the three would have done it. But after a whole career in establishment politics, it would have been hard for her to credibly run as a rabble-rousing populist like Bernie.

What I think would have made the difference would have been

1)Acknowledging(not paternizing, not kowtowing-to, but ACKNOWLEDGING) the Sanders phenomenon and the validity of what it was about, and treating the Sanders people as partners in the process. With young voters whose party loyalty and trust in the process has not been cemented that would have made a huge difference, and it could have been done without doing any disservice to those already solidly with us;

2)Centering the campaign ads on the platform and what we proposed to do, rather than wasting so much time attacking Trump as a scumbag-focusing so much on him made it look as though WE had nothing to offer;

The voters were never going to elect us just because Trump was a verbal sewer-they needed to know what we would do FOR them. They always need to know that, and we always have to work on the assumption that the voters have short memories.

What I've both read and observed about electoral politics has left me with a pretty pessimistic view of the "average voter." For example, this interview with the authors of "Democracy for Realists", a book I haven't read yet but intend to.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/1/15515820/donald-trump-democracy-brexit-2016-election-europe

I mean, frankly, even considering voting for the GOP in any race is pretty much insane unless (a) you are a total religious fundamentalist who only cares about abortion (b) you are straight-up racist or (c) you are incredibly rich and don't care about the future of the earth. And yet, about half of of voters actually choose the GOP in every national election.

Political junkies like you and me care about policy details, but we're a small minority of the population. But for most people, the "policy preferences" they have are lower taxes and at the same time more government services. In my opinion it mostly comes down to tribalism and personal appeal. I mean, Obama won two national elections handily running on a platform that was, if anything, to the right of Hillary's last year. And I have very little doubt that he would have beaten Trump handily as well.

Bernie had a lot of energy and a large following, but he wasn't saying anything significantly different from what Dennis Kucinich tried in elections past. The difference is that Bernie was an inspiring speaker and Kucinich was a weirdo.

IMO, by the time the primaries were over last year, people's impressions of Hillary were already baked in. The limits to how much she could inspire Bernie's supporters were due to the simple fact that she wasn't Bernie. She was the furthest thing from an outsider that a person can be. There's no way she can pull off calling for a political revolution to unseat the oligarchs.

The reason I come down on the "far left" or whatever you want to call them is because they are also a tribe, and a destructive one. They are leftists, and they are political junkies, so they should know better. There is simply no rational way to justify being on the fence between Hillary and Trump (or voting for Jill Stein, or write-in). This is true TPP or no TPP. Those fence-sitters you were canvassing, I hate to say it, were irrational and driven purely by emotion. Policy ads? Meh.

Yeah, maybe doing what you say might have helped with some of them. Maybe it would have hurt with some other equally irrational people in another part of the electorate. Who knows.

the namecalling is counterproductive, hopefully we agree on that.

And if a lot of people who supported Bernie in the primaries feel that there has been a VERY long stream of derp and bullshit thrown at them, maybe some folks should do some self-examination and as themselves why that is.

Doing some self-examination really isn't a bad idea. Taking our own advice isn't a bad one, either.

...maybe I did. But I don't think so. Like, run a search on my username and see if I've ever tossed around terms like "neoliberal" or "corporatist". I don't think I have.

But I'll be the first to acknowledge that I'm not perfect. When someone is convinced beyond any reason or self-doubt that they are infallible, you get that egotistical clusterfuck in the Oval Office.

I'd like it if we as a party could focus more on issues and less on whose team has a long-standing grudge against whose other team, personally. And unlike Trump on Charlottesville, I think it's reasonable in that circumstance to say both sides have some blame.

But I also learned a long time ago not to confuse the more navel-gazing drama aspects of DU with the actual larger political conversation in this country.

My only point in this latest dustup is the context of Trump's meaning of alt-left is completely different and that is important. IMO it's actually offensive and exploitative to try to equate it with how DUers use it.

We can all name examples. But the primaries ended a year ago.

Since then, the people that I have been calling the "alt-left" first refused to vote for Hillary, thus paving the way for Trump. Since then, they have been constantly attacking the Democratic Party as "corporatist" and "neoliberal" and all that.

The only people I call names are name-callers themselves. But as long as there are people like Jimmy Dore and Susan Sarandon and the rest posing as progressives but effectively aiding the GOP, I'm going to call them out, whether it's "alt-left" or some other word.

His entire argument that the protesters Saturday were fringe and not a deep and broad coalition is absolute bullshit. Why are people buying into his framing? I don't get it.

And to Heather Heather Heyer

She is a hero and will not be forgotten

Thank you.

I don't think there is a serious internal war amongst DU'ers.

There are loud and somewhat popular personalities on the internet who claim to support Bernie but detract from his message by embracing and promoting CT that's originated with the alt-right. The Seth Rich conspiracy that originated in the bowels of Fox News

Those people are not us and we do not do that.

There are some who claim none of that exists, and anyone who says otherwise is just smearing the left, or "being divisive". This claim that alt-left doesn't exist, and those on DU that use the terms are using the slur just like Trump is a version of this gaslighting. It's especially disgusting as it exploits the tragedy of Charlottesville.

I would prefer to say that Bernie represents the FDR faction of the Democratic Party.(IMO)

on the right and the left in his time and wanted to use American military power to fight fascism on the ground?

And wasn't he a politician who made economic reforms to save free market democracy from the threats posed by populists on both flanks.

And didn't FDR's critics call him a "plutocrat?"

So, I'm not seeing it.

This term has no real meaning in the real world. In the real world, a common mistake is to accept the terminology of the other side. Accepting such terminology is a good way to lose the argument.

I really do not believe that the term "alt-left" has any real meaning other that on Fox News and in trump's head. We can use the term as a joke but we make a mistake if we let Trump and Fox control the terminology of the debate.

Since I do not accept the validity of the term "alt left", I also believe that it is silly to argue which non-trump supporters this term applies to. Getting is such a debate gives validity to an otherwise meaningless term

just reads like one group trying to control another.

Just my humble opinion.

There are questions about my use of one term...but they raise valid points.

There are people more extreme than me about certain things, but they aren't the equivalent of the alt-right. They aren't bigoted - they just see things in a less practical way than me.

For one thing, when people on DU and other like-minded individuals say The Alt-Left, they're talking about a group. Nobody says You're an Alt-Left! It's always been a wonky pundit term more than an insult anyway. The favored interpersonal insult here at DU has always been Bernie Bro, or Bernie or Buster for the more hard core. Trump was using a term the way old relatives use words they think are cool, and then use them not quite in the right way.