Quote of the day:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
—Mark Twain

I consider myself pretty far left politically. In fact I sometimes jokingly tell folks that I’m somewhat to the left of Noam Chomsky.

And yet when I take one of those political quizzes that are supposed to place you on the left/right political spectrum, they generally classify me as being just a little bit left of center, almost a moderate or a centrist.

And I hate those wishy-washy moderate centrists who are too namby-pamby to take a stand on anything!

So why do those quizzes place me so close to the center?

I think it’s because in the end I’m a pragmatist and I’m willing to compromise. Rather than end up with nothing at the end of the day, I’ll settle for half a loaf. Hell, I’ll settle for 5% of a loaf if the alternative is absolutely nothing at all.

I’m not like those Bernie Bros in the 2016 election, who, when they realized they weren’t gonna get their preferred candidate (Bernie Sanders), they stuck their thumbs up their assholes and stayed home on Election Day rather than vote for Hillary Clinton, and that’s one of the reasons that we ended up with that rapist in the Oval Office the first time. 

Going back even farther to the 2000 election there was that idiot Ralph Nader who thought that if he could steal enough votes from Al Gore to force a victory for the Republican ticket, that would sour the electorate on the Republicans for a generation. Well, he did, and that’s how we ended up with Dick Cheney in the White House. How did that turn out, Ralphie?

But I digress… 

Anyway a recent podcast from On the Media addressed the conventional wisdom of whether moderates win more elections, and as it turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Do Moderates Win More Elections?

They interviewed Elliott Morris of the Strength in Numbers news website, and they examined a recent article in the New York Times that concluded that moderates do win more elections. But in the process of pointing out that the New York Times is full of shit (my words, not theirs), they noted that those moderates were better funded than the progressives that the Times used as points of comparison. 

They also found that many Americans have a cartoonish view of what the Democratic Party stands for, thanks in part to the crummy news media and the lies that the GOP harps on.

The podcast is worth a listen, but if you aren’t a podcast person, you might want to check out a couple of these articles:

Moderation is not a silver bullet, by Elliott Morris

The Strategist’s Fallacy in American politics, by Elliott Morris