The Centrist Dilemma

With the knockdown, drag-out Democratic primary ongoing, and rich men throwing their hat in the ring on a late, long shot, vanity campaign, the thing that keeps popping up is electability. And from everything I can read, electability means a centrist candidate who some average white guy from Michigan will vote for.

Well, normally I would say a centrist is probably a good way to go about things. Everyone is mildly disappointed, but overall comfortable. It' that thing called compromise that doesn't seem to have any sort of place in politics anymore.

The problem is, the Republican party (according to data from the Manifesto Project) has at least been moving further right, and since they've largely been in charge of the Legislative and sometimes the Executive branch, it feels like things are moving more right. We've had groups like the Freedom caucus and Tea Party get loud. We've had the mass exodus of many moderate and establishment Republicans.

One of the hopes with the Obama presidency was that we would get more people on board with his progressive ideas. He thought he could reach across the aisle and get Obamacare passed, get socialized programs passed, and move on from a presidency largely defined by 911 and a war in the Middle East. What did the compromise bring him? A half cooked bill, a denied Supreme Court justice who most agree was more than qualified, and hundreds of other filibustered bills. It mostly left people that voted for him disappointed.

I'm likely more left than the current country will ever be ready for. If it were up to me, everyone would get taxed more in order to pay for socialized medicine, higher and lower education, and I'd push a huge infrastructure bill that included re-usable energy, among other climate change policies leading my agenda. Basically, I want the New Deal 2.0. (And maybe along the way we revisit some of these gerrymandered district lines and the Electoral College.)

There's a reason why Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Ilhan Omar speak to my generation. We mostly want to go further left. We want progressive policies. We want to take care of our neighbors, and worry less about taking care of me and my. Frustratingly, most the country wants to go further left, but the current electoral system makes that difficult. It disenfranchises people from going to the polls because, "why does it even matter?"

We graduated, found low paying entry level jobs, and took raps on the knuckle when every think piece from the Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, etc talked about how lazy and entitled we were.

We saw states cut funding for higher education, meaning we took out much larger loans than the generations before us.

We saw entry level job salaries not keep up with the cost of living.

And then we were mocked for living with our parents instead of buying homes. We were chastised for not buying cars. We were lamented for not eating at chain restaurants.

When I was in college, I was condescendingly told, "When you're young, if you aren't liberal, you don't have a heart, when you're older, if you're not conservative, you don't have a brain." Well, I guess my generation must be ridiculously dumb, because it appears we're moving more and more liberal. If we're not trying to move forward and improve things, I don't know what we're doing.