If you want a real response. Here it is.

I had friends who were in the march to the capital of Tallahassee during the period of time where judges were deciding the fate of the election. I was stuck in my ****ty job and couldn't afford to get fired at the time so I wasn't there. But from what I've heard from firsthand accounts there. There were thousands of people. It wasn't like people were idle.

Storming the streets to create some leftist utopia is a dopey sentiment. People who you guys call leftists aren't doing it. And when they have (the milo-berkeley thing) there was looting of a starbucks and smashing atms. Which sparks backlash and whatever good message there was gets lost or waterdowns the action of the people who were at UCB peacefully. That part was livestreamed. Feel free to check it out.

I mean if you are going to call peaceful protesters cowards, gtfo.

Anyway I'm surprised USA isn't burning yet.
Surprised and not so surprised.

I'm not the one calling people feckless or judging people for living their lives, weez.

The real world isn't some place where storming the streets is an option for 95% of the adult population. And I don't see the people who think it is that easy doing it themselves.

I wasn't aware of mass protests and your example does water down one point I made (the only one you chose to address).

Not sure what you're talking about with the other stuff, DSA is all over the place and I recently joined a large group of them canvassing for a local union.

Just missed EDIT window:

The Supreme Court protest point is probably not a good one, you're right. Liberals WERE out in the streets worldwide soon after that against Iraq.

Which makes it all the more baffling and embarrassing that this energy never trickled up to electoral politics or anything approaching mainstream political commentary until 2015. Check out the documentary "Left of the Dial" about a "left" attempt at talk radio (Air America) for a flashback to horrible 2004 liberal commentary (and there's still huge swathes of the commentator/comedian class who are like that).

Nader was the only game in town - the original point I was responding to.

Having lived through this period of the Democratic Party and as one of those anti-war marchers, I disagree with this characterization of the recent past. First, the anti-war protests and later turn in the Democratic Party against the Iraq war was one of the biggest reasons for the big Democratic wave in 2006 and for Obama defeating Clinton in 2008, so they certainly did trickle up into electoral politics.

Second, while Air America wasn't very successful (although it did get Al Franken and Rachel Maddow started), the leftwing blogosphere of the time was powerful as a different version of today's online and podcast leftwing culture (preferable imo because it was more interactive). It's easy to miss how much this changed the media culture from what came before because now almost all opinion writing is some version of blogging or microblogging.

Nader himself was the cause of a big part of the difference between the left then and today. Many of us (myself included as a Nader voter in 2000) believed his description of Bush and Gore as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, only to be rudely awakened by the stark differences between them after the election - with Gore becoming the most famous climate change activist in the world and an opponent of Bush's pre-emption doctrine leading to the Iraq War and W ending up, well, how he did. Given Nader's role as a spoiler giving the election to Bush, the lefty blogosphere, as exemplified most strongly in the organizing spearheaded by the Daily Kos, mostly adopted a more pragmatic attitude towards the Democratic Party, focused on growing the party back into power as the most important goal and largely rejecting Nader's characterization of the two parties as being two sides of the same coin.

When you get this kind of response, your meme game is on another level.

Sounds to me like the Bush v. Gore protesters should have been more demonstrative

Lead by example then.

Good points, but this energy then comes from mostly the milquetoast barely left of center late night comedy corporate wing, not the actual left that Nader represented. It maybe helped get the one President (or it's just that Obama was talented) but then after that was complete disaster, losing ground everywhere perhaps to an extent that we'll never recover from.

The Naders are wrong to say there's "no difference" yes, but that's about all they're wrong about. The pragmatic attitude towards the Democratic Party is fine, but this has often manifested in like popular political horse twitter accounts saying that nobody should ever criticize a Democrat and nobody should ever try to primary a Democrat (except for fringe left Democrats like Omar and AOC of course).

Again, I think this isn't fair. Yes, lots of people on the lefty blogosphere enjoyed Stewart and Colbert (Colbert's parody of Bush at the WHCD is still effective), but I don't think Stewart and Colbert are a good representation of the political ideology of that movement. Stewart was much more in line with the anti-partisan attitude of Nader actually, just was more focused on Bush and the GOP as the incompetent party in power at the time. In contrast, most of the most prominent bloggers - digby, Atrios, FDL, and others were pretty clearly on the leftwing of the Democratic party of the time. It's true that the leftwing of the Party today is further to the left than it was then, but that is at least partially a function of the center being moved by these bloggers. I'll also point out that the 2006 Democratic wave had nothing to do with Obama. In fact, Obama helped kill the blogosphere as an independent force by moving political organizing onto Facebook and eventually into the OFA.

The lefty blogosphere was a huge force in successfully primarying Joe Lieberman, (who was a much more prominent figure than Joe Crowley). It also had the same complaints directed against it of being insufficiently civil towards others that are directed towards CTH and others on the left today.

I found these interesting.

Schumer vs. AOC
Favorable/unfav/don't know
For NYC: 58/35/6 vs. 43/37/21
For <50k income: 52/34/14 vs. 30/27/43

Cuomo vs. AOC
hero/villain/rp/don't know
For NYC: 27/23/35/15 vs. 18/29/28/25
For <50k income: 25/17/32/26 vs. 11%/26%/24%/39%

AOC's support base may be even narrower than I thought.