@Nastarana I repeat: there are 435 members of Congress. Significant changes are needed right away.

There are a few more than 8 leftist or progressive if you will members of the House. Prayapal, Lieu, and Porter come to mind and I think there might be a few others. Porter was targeted for extinction by the Rs, so her victory is especially significant.

I love Caitlyn Johnstone, but she seems to believe we have approximately the population of Australia.

Biden owes his victory to the efforts of DSA, Abrams and many others who got voters registered and to the polls. The RW media was squawking No Fair about how leftist organizations in Florida were simply PAYING the fines the RW legislature passed to keep former felons--guys and gals who had already PAID their debt to society, and how many RW types ever pay their debts?--from voting. BTW anyone who thinks what happened to Gillam wasn't a set-up is hopelessly naïve. Biden is an ungrateful bastard, which is one of many reasons I wrote in Bernie's name.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal is the notion that Clintonian "pragmatism" has anything to do with the Bernie Sanders agenda. Yet Sanders campaigned for one of the two Clintons, and for Obama's VP as well.

And yes. The Left can't be both a legion of superheroes and a bunch of lesser-evil voters at the same time. The "hybrid," as you were trying to work it out, is that of Superheroes Who Don't Matter.

at the center of the Nice Liberal/Neoliberal Political Alliance:

"We" cannot be both superheroes and lesser-evil voters at the same time.

I'm having a harder and harder time seeing the Nice Liberal/Neoliberal Political Alliance as a real political anything, as it's looking less and less like human beings attempting to gain power to achieve political goals and more and more like a propaganda piece. What I mean by that is that sometimes it seems like this Nice Liberal/Neoliberal alliance doesn't have anything to do with actual people trying to accomplish anything except to persuade the masses that political reality is, or is not, a certain way.

and at the heart of that enterprise is a foul cognitive dissonance. It goes something like this:

1)Reagan and Bush wipe the floor with both liberals and the left for twelve years. Cultural sturm und drang. Leftists erased as if they didn't exist; liberals tarred as unfit for public office.

2)The Clintons and Al From to the rescue. They show the silly liberals and those who shall not be named how to be acceptable people, teaching them that kissing the ass of rich people and the CIA is basically the only way to be politically successful. The liberals, and some of the left, are so demoralized that they accept these terms, telling themselves it won't be too bad, and at least won't be as bad as more Reagan and Bush. We have to compromise. That doesn't sound too bad. It almost sounds polite and civic. And mature. Let's not forget mature. Smart, adult people learn that leftists have to give up their ideas, values and dreams, just like the little girl has to give up that overpriced dolly she wants in the window. We just don't have the money (votes, power, etc). to get you that dolly, honey. Maybe someday we'll get that dolly, but probably little girls are just going to have to grow up and understand that you can't always get what you want.

3)So "pragmatism" and "centrism" are the order of the day for all us mature, worldly-wise liberals who are following Bill Clinton like a will o' the wisp out of the quagmire of the Reagan-Bush years, so desperate for anything resembling a win we'd agree to drink straight petroleum if it would get us a decent showing in November, and we are supposed to leave behind the idea of justice and the idea of creating any kind of society a leftist would want to actually live in. Abandon that silly passion and those silly morals in the trash heap of history.

4)A lot of other shit happens, but the point is that:

5)Obama comes along and suddenly we're supposed to dust off all that passion and all those morals, and put them into the service of lesser-evilism. In other words, we are now uniting, in an almost Hegelian manner, the thesis of a Great Society/social-justice-driven left and the antithesis of a New Democratic "pragmatism." And the only way this can possibly work is through the figure of Obama himself. Morality is dedication to Obama, because if you don't support the first Black president you must be immoral, and justice is saying Obama is right because if you disagree with the first Black president you must be a bigot. Unquestioning adherence to Obama *is* justice.

6) Once it's established that dedication to a particular Democratic elected official *is* justice, you can extend the metaphor at will and apply it to any Democratic party leader, even when what you're supporting is two very rich and sometimes quite racist white people, such as Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, and the sole, tenuous connection you have to anything resembling the ideals of what used to be the Left is that Hillary Clinton has two X chromosomes rather than one.

7)So now you have an ugly hybrid, a monster of two irreconcilable concepts jammed together: the moral imperative of the anti-war and anti-racism movements of the sixties forced into congress (heh) with Clintonian "pragmatism," the force responsible, more than any other, for driving both "liberals" and "the left" out of all meaningful deliberations of American public policy.

The propagandists are giving liberals (and whatever leftists are willing to go along) a place to put their frustrated desire for justice and the betterment of the world. They are giving them the narrative of rising up against ugliness, bigotry and authoritarianism and defeating the tyrants and bigots on behalf of not only truth, justice, and the American way, but also on behalf of a whole range of imperiled and anguished oppressed groups, most of whom we don't hear from except via certain well-vetted and well-paid influencers, all of whom magically share the same complete obedience to Clintonian "pragmatism," whose role is to buttress the credibility of the idea that a passion for justice can co-exist with obedience to the Democratic party leadership. And it needs constant buttressing, because ideologically, it's held together with spit and a prayer. Actually, it's a mirage. Drink sand, baby.

Of course, this political narrative requires not only a holy savior (Obama) but also a demonic villain, and I do wonder whether they're going to continue to use Trump or dig up someone else even more loathsome.