And I'd like to offer a perspective here, in response to the gist of your post. With all politeness, here is the thing those who sit solidly on their lofty principles and morals need to understand: Get the fuck over yourself. No one is acting entitled to your vote. No one is "believing" shit about causes. Hillary Clinton was, objectively, the most qualified person to ever run for President of the United States. Donald Trump was, objectively, the least qualified person to ever run for President of the United States. Now - you can get all high'n'mighty about that. You can get all principled. You can pucker so hard your tighty whiteys floss your goddamn teeth but the fact of the matter is, populists and opportunists wanted to break some shit because they preferred failure to business as usual and, to the precise expectation of all thinking human beings, failure has not been productive. I give absolutely zero fucks about your politics, your morals, your standards, how you've voted, how you'll vote in the future, any of it. If your sink is backing up and you have a choice between the plumber that charges you too much while he lectures you about garbage disposals behind his plumber's crack or the manic street preacher who thinks it might be fun to be a plumber, you pick the fucking plumber. I don't care if he goes to a different church, drinks at a different bar, votes for a different party, wears the wrong clothes, eats cereal for dinner, whatever. If one guy knows how to use a pipe wrench and the other one doesn't, VOTE PLUMBER. Save your compromises and two way streets for areas of nuance.
Hey, thanks for chiming in because you demonstrate exactly what I am talking about. You can come on here and curse and storm and argue for the annihilation of nuance and ethics in favor of blunt realpolitik, but at the end of the day this self-righteous edginess accomplishes nothing but alienating a potential ally. If there is anything that this most recent election has proven, it is that you as a Democrat need me more than I, as a moderate, need you. You are right about one thing, though, which is that I prefer short-term failure (from which we might actually learn something) to the long term status quo, which I sincerely believe would lead to ultimately more catastrophic failure when it would be too late to change.
Hey, thanks for hanging on to your self-righteousness like a coat of many colors. Does it keep you warm? You're not a potential ally. You never were. Sure, you held your nose and voted for Bernie but what's most important to you is that we all know how distasteful you find everyone else's position before you ask what they are. Meanwhile you get a chance to expound on your Goldilocks politics whereby to "earn" your vote one must triangulate to exactly the sort of magical policy choices you demand so that the rest of us know this whole Trump thing? Yeah, you're above all that. You're principled. Go ahead and say "realpolitik" again, it makes you look so clever. I'm right about a lot of shit. You act like I've never talked to you before, like I've never had these discussions with beard-stroking brow-knitting thinkers who insist that the water must not be too hot, must not be too cold must be just right or they won't go swimming. Who universally refuse to acknowledge that for fuck's sake, man, the middle has been marching to you at double-time since Kennedy fuckin' died. Who insist they're "moderates" even though Clinton was slightly to the right of Nixon. Who somehow can't grasp that they're actually pretty goddamn right wing and the real problem is that the Right has grown so populist that Buckley wouldn't approve so they have to lodge their disapproval by slummin' it with the Lefties. Edgy? Naah, dude, I'm giving you the whole axe because you're a fraud. I don't even care what you believe; it doesn't really matter because the reason you believe it is it makes you special not because you've thought much about the way the country oughtta run. So go ahead, drop the mic. Mate the check. you've solved me, bitch. You were Right about the Left which is why you Left the Right or some shit. "Realpolitik" is full of assholes like me that will forever be jealous of your brilliance. The principled thing is to never vote again. At least until you figure out that politics is about something greater than yourself.
The hell do you want from me, anyway? You want me to say, "Fuck you, too"? If I wanted that kind of interaction, I could just stay on Reddit. You know why I came here? This: What makes for a good comment? The best comments are those that generate thoughtful, civil conversation. You don't have to agree with others, but be respectful. Good comments are not necessarily popular perspectives, but are well-supported ones. If you assert a strong opinion, try to back it up with facts, or an insightful rationale. If you want to hit reset and actually have a conversation, I'm willing. But if all you have for me is a steaming pot of "Fuck you," I'm not biting.
I want you to not waste my time. I want you to not waste anybody else's time. What kind of interaction do you want? That's pretty fuckin' obvious from your first two comments - the one on my post where you said seven paragraphs of nothing so you could sound clever and the one on this post where you say pardon me, I'm special, don't insult me three days ago when I wasn't even here. Check this shit out: and So which is it? Should we hold firm against the fringe or should we appease you? Inquiring minds want to know what this hapless Democratic party should do to hold the right edge and you held two oppositional viewpoints in the space of an hour. So welcome. Thanks for joining our conversation. Now make some good comments because so far all you've accomplished is a bunch of pseudo-intellectual posturing that isn't even internally consistent and I don't need that shit in my feed. Make an argument, support it and add to the conversation. Insist that discussions must align to your sensitivities? Isn't that what Tumblr is for?This idea that giving in to the fringes to appease them would somehow move the parties to the center is, however, sadly misguided. History has consistently shown that the strategy of appeasement can only fan the flames of hatred.
...here is the thing those who sit solidly on the left need to understand: You are not entitled to our votes. No matter how right you believe your cause to be, you cannot control how others think and act.
Everyone here will place emphasis on different parts of that blurb, though. Some people balance out the whole thing equally. Others value the 'civil' and 'insightful' bits with different weights. Each has their own interpretation of what those terms actually mean. People will rub each other the wrong way from time to time. Instead of down votes, you'll find moderation tools for each user on the left hand side their profile page. You'll also find filter links at the top of the feed pages for tags and webdomains. You can use these features heavily, or not at all. It depends on what you want.
But... Bernie isn’t moderate. You can’t really say you are moderate when you want to vote for the guy who’s the opposite of moderate. You said you don’t like Democrats for pandering to the far-left and that it alienates you but Bernie was the one doing that.
You should see my other comment above, because I talk about some of this there. If the extremes are campus radicals and the alt-right, then Bernie is not that far left. He is also more conciliatory than party-line Democrats or Republicans. I would also argue that what "moderate" (or perhaps more accurately "independent") really means in the modern context is not as simple as falling squarely between Democrat and Republican values on any given issue. I have views that go both left and right, at least as typically defined by people who disagree with them. I call my views "moderate" because it is easier to understand than saying that they are part of a coherent worldview that is not defined by our simplistic binary party system. I don't think this is a term that should really need to be defined - it's not as though everyone who identifies as moderate is from Futurama's Neutral Planet.
Moderate doesn’t mean independent, you can’t just make up the meaning of words and then expect to have a decent conversation with other people who actually know what the words mean. Words do need to be defined and moderate will never mean socialist AF.