Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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pasayten
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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New Seattle music video... Parody... Sad but has become a reality... :-(

https://rumble.com/v18n05w-new-seattle- ... RFJHGqUxjA
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Ray Peterson
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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I would imagine that Covid and now the housing shortage are contributing to the problem of homelessness, but the points in this article about inadequate mental health facilities seems valid. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e7 ... cdd4cc1aed

Context. What's happening across the US as the population moves out of the inner cities.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... ss/629665/
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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Rideback wrote: Tue Jun 14, 2022 10:02 am Seattle's economy has been growing at a faster pace
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/new ... 0%20metros.
The figures quoted were for the entire Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area... Not just Seattle proper... Many businesses have pulled out of Seattle proper, but are still in the "metro" area.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/c ... tle-macys/

https://www.king5.com/article/news/crim ... 5b5fc16969

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/d ... -pandemic/
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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Seattle's economy has been growing at a faster pace
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/new ... 0%20metros.
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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Thanks for educating me. In theory progressism sounds good. Our government is here to help. But then the misguided programs or ill named programs happen. Whoever thought of the phrase "Defund the police" did a great disservice inusing that name. Calling it something else that calls for the re-apropriation of funds for other services would be more postive. I had a name awhile back but can't think of it.
Yep, the last statement you quoted from Rideback would be the ideal.
What we see in the cities is a breakdown of our society.
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism

https://classroom.synonym.com/definitio ... 80919.html

This I can agree with... Pendulem in Seattle swung way too far left...
I prefer personally to say that we need an active two party system again that can re activate the art of compromise and get some policies going that will clean up and rebuild.
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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Progressive Liberals support the interests of the ordinary people through political change and support good govt actions.

Seattle is a myriad of issues, many of which are arguably a result of bad choices and implementation. Tim Eyman is a thorn in everyone's side. But realistically the state itself has benefitted from Democratic leadership, our economy is top of the list of states, we have a large amount of innovators who call the state home.

I'm not sure how to answer you Ray, I have to say that SF and Calif are doing better than most states and if you were to literally compare what Seattle looks like with what Chicago has undergone or what is happening in Texas or Louisiana perhaps Seattle would look a bit better. The 2000's have been a rough go, the '08 crash took a whole lot out of infrastructure and Covid took a whole lot out of everybody.

I prefer personally to say that we need an active two party system again that can re activate the art of compromise and get some policies going that will clean up and rebuild.
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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I don't even know what progressive liberal is. Ray or Rideback can you define what it is in 25 words or less?
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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Well having lived and worked in Seattle from when I was born in 1947 to my retirement in 2006, I can tell you that the last 10-12 year of progressive liberal politics has been a big failure to a once vibrant and beautiful city. What a shame.

https://www.facebook.com/SeattleLooksLikeShit
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Re: Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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I get so tired of these opinion pieces that rob from other writers (in this case Time & Newsweek) and go after either the Right or the Left. They cherry pick to make either side feel like they're losers and that the great game of winners and losers is all that matters.
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Left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left

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Why even left-wing voters have soured on the rising progressive left
Seattle Times - June 9, 2022 at 6:00 am

Nine years ago I wrote about a certain rising political force in city politics and how it was turning Seattle into a “leading indicator” for a major shake-up of liberalism.“The election isn’t for 10 days, but we can already declare the big winner in Seattle,”that 2013 column began. “It’s the socialist.”The premise was that Kshama Sawant had yet to be elected to the Seattle City Council,but her views, and her protest-fueled style,were signaling a tectonic shift in liberal politics.Out was the market-oriented liberalism of traditional Democratic politicians like Barack Obama, where equality of opportunity was the goal. In was a sweeping“new new left” with a more radical goal:equality of outcomes, in everything from pay to education.It’s been a strong run for that rising new left, at least in West Coast incubator cities like Seattle. It led to everything from the $15
Seattle minimum wage to major experiments incriminal justice reform, such as slashing police budgets, and pledges to incarcerate so few people that we could close both the adult and youth jails. Is the run over? Who can say? — maybe it’s just on pause. But an “old left” vibe sure seems ascendant these days in elections up and down the WestCoast.

One San Francisco political pundit called it “the revenge of the Obama Democrats.”After San Francisco voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly recalled their progressive,light-on-crime district attorney, Chesa Boudin, another local columnist said the city’s famously left-wing voters had simply “tired of ideology taking precedence overreal nuts-and-bolts progress.”People are “fed up that nothing related to city government seems to be working,” wrote Chronicle columnist Heather Knight.“Frustrated that this city with so much potential isn’t remotely living up to it. I rate that a city with so many built-in advantages— wealth, beauty, diversity, creativity, smarts— is so much less than the sum of its parts.”Sound familiar? These same themes echoed through last fall’s Seattle elections — when voters likewise tossed out a reform-minded city attorney, Pete Holmes, and also passed over the left-progressive candidate in the mayor’s race for a classic “Obama Democrat,” Bruce Harrell.On Tuesday, voters in Los Angeles also gave first place in a mayoral primary to a former Republican who, like Harrell here, is promising to clear the city’s sprawling homeless encampments.Seattle political consultant Christian Sinderman experienced both sides of this voter mood shift — he ran Holmes’ losing campaign for Seattle city attorney, but also Harrell’s winning campaign for mayor.

“I think what voters are saying is there is only so far and so fast you can push the progressive vanguard,” Sinderman said.“It doesn’t mean people here have gotten less progressive-minded,” he said. “But there’s a counterpressure now, which is causing a return to a kind of civic do-gooder who is interested in basic problem-solving, instead of the more partisan, ideological approach.”Prime example, he says: Defund the police.Seattle is down 400 cops, but we haven’t added more than a handful of mental health counselors or social workers to take their places.
“It got ahead of itself, and so now people see that it just isn’t working,” Sinderman said.“But that doesn’t mean Seattleites are no longer interested in alternatives to the police.”The recall campaign in San Francisco featured a heavy rotation of viral videos showing rampant shoplifting going unchallenged. We’ve all seen similar security footage shot here at the downtown Seattle Target store. Outrage about the videos doesn’t mean voters think the shop lifters should be jailed for long sentences, but voters also see that the “no consequences”approach leads to civic chaos.In this gap lies political opportunity: “You’regoing to see a third way emerge,” a veteran Democratic consultant told the Chronicle in San Francisco.

People can want more police officers, rejecting defund the police. The same people can want drug offenders to get treatment,not jail — which is a core plank of the defund movement.This Obama-type nuance is what new Seattle Mayor Harrell was channeling in his inaugural address when he kept repeating“Yes, and.” Yes, shelter the homeless and keep parks clear of encampments; yes,demand fair policing and go hard after gun crime.Easy to say, tough to pull off — especially when populists on both the left and the right don’t trust institutions to work anymore.

Personally I have warm, sepia-toned feelings toward the Obama style of building coalitions and painstakingly bending the arc of history toward justice. But pragmatic approaches have been considered part of the problem in places like Seattle or SanFrancisco, where scores of activists feel the systems are hopelessly corrupted by inequality and racism.Back to Sawant, who, for a time, so successfully tilted Seattle politics. Is she done? Not done taking up the fight. She was recently featured in Current Affairs, a new left magazine, in an essay about all this. It’s headlined: “The Left Is Losing Because We’re Not Confrontational Enough.”That’s not what voters in these Protest Central cities seem to be saying. For now,anyway, they’re delivering a mundane rebuke to all that: The Left Is Losing Because We’re Not Competent Enough.

Danny Westneat:dwestneat@seattletimes.com;
DannyWestneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people andpolitics.
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