The very most that could be said for Carville is that he wants to stay in place on the slippery slope he built. There’s a lot of that going around the Dems.

But I’m pretty sure he isn’t principled or genuine, that he believes a lot more in DSA’s goals than he wants to let on at the moment, and that if they start to win elections he’s going to suck right up to them because fundamentally he worships power.

So now they are bitter with a mountain of student debt and the NGO gravy train is running dry and DEI won’t save them? They chose poorly it seems. Life is like that.

In their beliefs there is not even a chink of light between establishment Dems and DSA.

Please don’t be lulled by this sock-puppet meme.

There are differences in approach and timing – and of course, raw personal power plays.

But NO differences in hatred of America or the goals of weakening the Constitution from within.

— Ben David

This^^^.

The struggle within the Democratic Party is not about its soul, or its ideology (oh, I’ll grant a few individual Democrats fall into that category, but not the overall organization). It’s a power struggle between internal factions. The goals are mostly the same, but the ‘moderates’ know they can push too hard and cause a cave in, the hardliners don’t believe it. Ideologically, it’s a struggle between a faction that wants to go 90% of the way over ten or fifteen years and a faction that wants 95% today and 5% next week.

That’s why I’m not unduly sympathetic to Carville. Dude, you may hate this but you’ve spent decades laying the groundwork for it.

The real intensity of the struggle is who will be in charge. Will it be the familiar Establishment faces, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Carville types, or the Mamdami etc. crowd. Same reason so many Republicans want Trump destroyed and fight him even when he’s doing stuff they have advocated for in the past. They don’t want to give up their power and status to an outsider.

They all thought their Long Gramscian March through the culture would be crowned by NObama socializing medicine…. and dropped their masks too soon.

— Ben David

Again, this^^^.

I can still remember major Dems like Pelosi responding to questions about whether they could do what they were trying do with ‘we won’. If you listened to them, it was clear they didn’t just mean they had won in 2008, they thought they had won the culture war, won the power struggle, it was over. They soon discovered otherwise, but they revealed their real goals before they had secured their final victory.

Trump can nip this in bud. Declare by presidential proclamation the DSA is an existential threat to the US Constitution, declare their assets forfeit and arrest their leaders for conspiracy to overthrow the constitution. Declare the leaders are “deemed to have renounced” the constitution and they therefore get none of its protections.

Arrest without benefit of a grand jury indictment
Prosecution by military tribunal without benefit of trail by jury
No protection against self incrimination

— Chases Eagles

Trump can’t do that. It doesn’t matter if he has the legal authority or not (debatable), what matters is that he doesn’t have the political capital, and thus the power, to actually do it. If he tried that, he would be stopped hard.

Trump is not Lincoln, nor is he FDR. They could do things Trump simply cannot do, at least not yet.

William Lawrence’s life story described above — Swarthmore grad, son of two law professors at Michigan State — reminds me of Turchin’s “Elite overproduction”

— huxley

I agree that this is a lot of what is driving this, and it’s a lot why most of the support for the DSA comes from highly-credentialed upper class ‘limousine liberals’ and their middle-class kin.

There just aren’t enough high-status jobs for all the degrees. Income matters too, of course, there aren’t currently enough high-paying jobs for the degrees that they were told their degrees would entitle them to have, either. There’s more to it than money, though. A lot of these people would still be angry and dissatisfied if they had a job paying six figures but that was low social status. They thought they were training to be part of the ruling class, and there are too many of them for that.

This is esp. true of the ones whose degrees are particularly suited to that aspiration.

Of course their anger is not 100% unjustified. Uncontrolled immigration and H1x visas enable employers to undercut wages and replace Americans with foreigners at all status and income levels. But it’s also about social status.

Many young people actually are True Believers, and for decades their parents have defined themselves by their sneering at flyover folk and traditional patriotism for several generations.

A significant chunk of the population would view the actions you describe as confirmation of the worst slanders they have heard about Trump and MAGA… completely undoing the carefully cultivated Preference Cascade that is Trump’s major legacy, and which is the real solution: changing minds.

These people are reeling and desperate. They have no cards left, and must press forward with a program that was launched prematurely.

We like to fill in the blanks with our own experience – or assume everyone has had the same epiphany we have – but many of us are older, change is gradual, and we really don’t know how the beliefs of the “Silent Majority” have shifted over the past 70 years. There is a reason the MAGA machine is not resting on its laurels and continues to fight in as many races as it can (doing the work the GOPe won’t do).

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that has an excess supply of potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin#Elite_overproduction
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Which makes sense and we seem to be seeing it before our eyes. However, Turchin goes further into advanced modeling:
_________________________________

He is one of the founders of cliodynamics, the scientific discipline at the intersection of historical macrosociology, cliometrics, and mathematical modeling of social processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
_________________________________

Hari Seldon, move over!

Trump can nip this in bud. Declare by presidential proclamation the DSA is an existential threat to the US Constitution, declare their assets forfeit and arrest their leaders for conspiracy to overthrow the constitution. Declare the leaders are “deemed to have renounced” the constitution and they therefore get none of its protections.

Arrest without benefit of a grand jury indictment
Prosecution by military tribunal without benefit of trail by jury
No protection against self incrimination

Etc.

Please don’t be lulled by this sock-puppet meme.

There are differences in approach and timing – and of course, raw personal power plays.

But NO differences in hatred of America or the goals of weakening the Constitution from within.

Hilary it-takes-a-village Clinton’ s doctoral thesis was unabashedly Marxist… such are the “grand old statesmen” of the Democratic party… which include hoary-maned terrorists like Bernadine Dohrn and aging Black Panthers. The DSA kids are their star students.

They all thought their Long Gramscian March through the culture would be crowned by NObama socializing medicine…. and dropped their masks too soon.

The only difference is that the old folks have the self-control to pull back and bide their time… they are unable to control the young monsters they have created.

Do not be fooled. Do not let your vision be clouded by wishful thinking that *some* of these people – the cultural tastemakers for most of our lives! – were/are normal patriots.

Perhaps friends and neighbors can be excused as useful idiots, but not the pols, poobahs, and pundits.

They are all finger puppets on one (Left!) hand…

Like John Brennan was not a card-carrying communist when accepted by the CIA, and later made its director: he just voted for the Communist candidate that one time in 1976, when he was young.

https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jul/19/ron-desantis/was-john-brennan-once-member-communist-party/

“So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, ‘I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall’ … and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that’s not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government,” CNN reported him [Brennan] as saying.

Why wouldn’t the DSA think they have a chance to run the election tables?