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Comment by o_class_star | Hacker News Reader

The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at branding, and we've let Capital convince half the country that it's actually a "liberal elite" that is holding them down.

We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.

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The Democratic Party (its representatives and organization, not its voters) is not pro-drug legalization, and when in power has prosecuted the war on drugs aggressively. It's very odd to refer to drug legalization as "our ideas," yet still 1) associate them with the Democratic Party, which does not agree with them, and 2) refer to the election of a Democratic POTUS who has said that he doesn't support drug legalization as a "victory."

This is clearly the democrats biggest problem. Biden just lost Florida largely because Trump falsely called him a socialist. Democrats are absolute losers when it comes to successfully getting people to understand their message.

"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people.

Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.

AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.

This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.

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