Where did all the intellect go?
The social dilemma documentary I think is very useful. It feels like social media bubbles are a large component, although of course there have been many contentious elections in the past.
Being centrist I can relate to parts of both sides but my experience is they both dislike centrists.
A good phrase I ran into is "strategic empathy". Like Sun Tzu teaches:
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
Sadly, humans seem allergic to this kind of thinking. As Orwell writes in "Notes on Nationalism":
"The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right."
The smart (if mistaken) reasons to vote Trump were always trade and the Democratic Party's abandonment of Labor.
And Republicans, on the other hand, who think Biden is a socialist are delusional.
It's possible, though, that people aren't as dumb as they seem. For an individual, pretending not to empathize with the opposition is probably safer in a tribalized society. So perhaps that's what we're really witnessing.
In any case, Biden was called a socialist before he picked his VP. e.g.
https://mobile.twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1241717700...
The Democratic Party didn't abandon labor. Labor and the electorate abandoned the Democratic Party. Starved for funding and votes, the Democratic Party moved right and embraced neoliberalism. Mondale was pro-labor. He was crushed by Reagan in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States...
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/22/magazine/labor-s-gamble-o...
As a European it was incomprehensible to me why anyone would vote for trump as I had only received the straw man version of Trump through my local media. But when traveling the U.S. early 2016 I had the good fortune of spending a few hours on a bus with two trump voters and having them explain their hopes for a trump presidency, and it no longer seemed irrational. The hope that having no loyalties or obligations to the political powers that be he could actually have policies which benefited regular people seemed reasonable. There is a fair argument to be made his actual economic policies have indeed mostly benefited Americans, so someone voting just based on the economy would not be irrational in choosing Trump.
Still, he’s Donald Trump, and a bully. I don’t think I could ever be convinced to ignore all the other stuff to the degree of voting for him. I can understand those who outright dismiss him and anyone aligned with him without seriously trying to engage with their arguments.
If we want to understand and get to the root of what just happened for the past 4 years, the left needs to step back and seriously reconsider its assumptions.
Explaining why taxes, redistribution of wealth, and allowing government to oversee certain services is actually beneficial to a market is a sure fire way to get called out as a communist and radical leftist.
Pointing out why historically, conservatives were deadset against abortion —in order to have a more productive discussion using pure history, not Bannon-style nonsense—is met with a absolute refusal to acknowledge the evidence.
Having a nuanced view makes no friends and just generates suspicion by all sides.
Secretly, I like it.
If you look at the extreme countercultures of the 60s, you see one side who hated "the system" that produced mass affluence, but loved the fruits of it. The other side loved the system, but hated the fruits. So one way to look at it is as a sort of political shibboleth indicating that you were definitely on one side and not the other.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=cf5RFWIMJugC&pg=PA42&lpg=P...
The anti-abortion position needs to be looked at in the context of eugenics, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/culturalanthropology/chapt...
That it really took off in the 1960s+ isn’t surprising with Nazi death camps fresh in everyone’s mind, leaving a very bad impression with anything tied to eugenics and its proponents.
While I don’t agree that abortion is equivalent to eugenics—-sorry, if my wife were to die otherwise I’d choose abortion—much of the revulsion has its moral roots in the argument against eugenics.
As far as I know that case isn't even considered abortion by any mainstream pro-life organization.
I was surprised they didn't mention this case until I realized it didn't even count in their view.
Some pro lifers want zero exceptions, but it’s extremist.
But tl;dr; answer: Modern abortion has its roots with a founder who was also strong advocate for eugenics.
She was a product of her time and really believed she was advocating for improvement of society, but the ideas took a dark turn.
The only notable opposition were from the conservative religious circles; but as noted even there the record is spotty.
Still, credit where credit is due.
Whether more modern evangelicals are rooted from the same opposition is irrelevant.
While saying the "only" reason is too strong, there have a number of studies showing it was a key factor:
* https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518000367
* https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0002716218811309
* https://doi.org/10.1086/700001
* https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2018.1441844
* https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2017.1378296
* https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfx048
* PDF: http://acme.highpoint.edu/~msetzler/Why_Did_Women_Vote_for_D...
I dunno, that doesn't sound sound to me, and people tend to draw bold conclusions from such matters.
I've seen quite a lot of such papers, proving that "conservatives are knowing liberals better than vice versa" or similar, but diving into methodology it seems like people are trying to exacerbate what the data says.
People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
Noted:
> Of course, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Both may have some validity. Moreover, as Michael Tesler has argued, economic anxiety and discontent among white voters in 2016 appear to be closely connected to racial resentment. His analysis of survey data indicate that many white voters, especially those without college degrees, believe that racial minorities and immigrants have been favored by government policies while their own communities have been neglected, especially during the Obama years (Tesler 2016b). The Trump campaign explicitly connected these issues by arguing that illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens and reducing wages for American workers.
> To sort out these competing explanations, we test the hypothesis that Trump’s surge among white working class voters, compared with previous GOP presidential candidates, was due to his explicit appeal to white racial resentment and ethno-nationalism. Thus, Trump’s campaign may have helped to politicize these attitudes, identifying them with a political party, especially among less educated white voters who tend to be less attentive to political campaigns and therefore less aware of differences between candidates on racial and other issues (Tesler 2016c). To test this hypothesis, we can compare the correlations between scores on the racial resentment scale and relative ratings of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates on the feeling thermometer scale over time among white voters with and without college degrees.
I didn't find methodology of this, so I looked for it. As a European, I'm appalled. This is how you define racism, really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_resentment_scale
> The racial resentment scale has been criticized for not separating racism from ideas like conservatism or individualism. Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention
Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.
america want to succeed but only if every moral decision is followed. realistically this is almost never enforced and people act amorally all the time even if doing so somewhat altruistically
> Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.
"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs, which are often viewed in a certain way:
> Here, we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy. We argue that when whites perceive threats to their relative advantage in the racial status hierarchy, their resentment of minorities increases. This increased resentment in turn leads whites to withdraw support for welfare programs when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit minorities.
* https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/97/2/793/5002999
* https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soy046
Some books on this:
> Wetts and Willer are hardly the first scholars to argue that racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution in the US. Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare in 1994 and Martin Gilens’s Why Americans Hate Welfare in 1999 credited racial factors — in particular, stereotypes of black people as lazy and overly dependent on government aid — with substantially reducing support for welfare spending since the war on poverty began in the 1960s.
* https://www.vox.com/2018/6/7/17426968/white-racism-welfare-c...
Yeah, are you sure that racism is about opposing welfare and quotas? Not thinking that other people are inherently inferior or malicious due to their race, but that there should be no affirmative action.
That sounds like a ill-minded umbrella term to me, invented to call people you don't like racist.
> racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution
It's not a surprise if you define racial animus as being against welfare.
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/you.stonybrook.edu/dist/f/1052...
> Consistent with the expectations of new racism researchers, resentment accounted for racial bias in support of the experimental college scholar-ship program examined in this study, reinforcing its role as a measure of racial prejudice. But these effects were confined to self-identified liberals. Racial resentment did not explain racially biased program support among conservatives and was not linked to other negative racial attitudes among them. This leaves the concept of racial resentment in real doubt. If resentment measures prejudice among liberals but not conservatives it cannot function successfully as a broad measure of racial prejudice.
I agree with this, but there’s a bit that I don’t understand about their mindset. If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better? You can’t just ban immigrants and solve the problem because the real problem is a system that allows exploitative labor practices. By American standards those immigrant workers are also getting a bad deal and the people doing the exploiting aren’t going to stop unless someone forces them to.
I think the reason you see people latching on to Trump is because they think all politicians want to maintain the status quo and they think Trump will break it. I understand the sentiment, but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them. All he seems to do IMO is assign blame and talk about how things should be. It’s easy to say “we have the greatest plan” or “everyone should live in a mansion”, but it’s really hard to actually have the greatest plan and to implement it or to build everyone a mansion.
It’s really sad because I think middle class America is being disenfranchised and there’s a near majority of people who’ve been convinced it’s the fault of poor, “lazy moochers” rather than the wealthy capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years.
I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. It’s just a matter of understanding the sides are wealthy vs everyone else, not right vs left.
I'm not sure they want less government. Walls are built by governments, tariffs are protectionist measure. They want neo-mercantilism, which Trump is embodiment of.
> but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them.
Oh, he started a big trade war with the gravest enemy stealing their jobs. I think he also imposed more strict immigration policy, but I'm not sure.
> capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years
I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia. Asians and tech companies reaped the productivity gains accordingly. I mean, even eastern europeans like myself saw an extraordinary increase in standards of living.
> middle class America is being disenfranchised
> I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy
I don't think that's your problem, and I don't expect american future to be good.
First, I think your political system is broken due to Duverger's law. Hence you have a political system where people have to adjust their views according to politicians' stances, and not vice versa. Lack of competition leads to corruption, regulatory captures etc etc, and I doubt that such system would find a will to reform itself.
Second, your wealthy already pay quite a lot of taxes, unlike Europe, where there is regressive VAT and high income tax for the middle class, and middle class is the main fiscal contributor. Hence your politician more concerned about well-being of those who affects budget the most. There is nothing strange here, and this kind of corporatism wouldn't heal itself as well.
I think that the root of your problem is not malicious rich whom Americans like to demonize so much, but broken beyond repair political system and unfair tax burden: politicians are more free to act as they will facing no pressure and competition, politicians strive to please big biz which is the main contributor to the budget. I'm really curious how you'll deal with that, if you'll manage to.
IMO the average person hasn’t gotten enough of the gains from tech and it’s one of the things that worries me. As automation accelerates we can’t tolerate a handful of elites reaping all the benefits from that.
I don’t know much about the USA tax system. I’m Canadian. We pay high taxes and I don’t have a problem with it. In general though, I think the wealthy elite in the world have been capturing a disproportionate amount of the wealth / productivity gains since the 80s.
I also think the rewards for “success” are way too high for CEOs, etc.. They claim to be irreplaceable, but whenever something bad happens and they get called before Congress they act like they barely know more than the janitor. I think their only real value is in knowing all the other rich people.
I believe in capitalism and think hard work needs to be rewarded, but that the rewards are skewed too much. Once you have 100x the standard of living of the average person in the wealthiest countries in the world I think that should be enough. Everything else is just pure greed.
> While saying the "only" reason is too strong, there have a number of studies showing it was a key factor
I'm not going to read all those links, so hopefully you ordered them by compelling-ness.
A racial demographic agreeing politically is different from racism. The black vote is fairly united on the opinion that Democrats offer a better option for black people. That isn't classed as 'racists voting for democrats'. Ditto hispanics. It follows that whites are voting as a racial block doesn't mean that whites are racist. And if they think Democrat policies noticeably favour blacks and hispanics then they are probably right, because that is what the blacks/hispanics think.
The study is fine, but it doesn't support "they're voting that way because they are racist".
Just a suggestion.
Maybe consider reducing the number of links, and posting the citation adjacent so we can see the title of the paper, and what journal it was published in before clicking. A brief tl;dr from the abstract would be magnificent as well.
Otherwise I'm just sort of taking on faith that whatever you posted will be worth the time to click on, and there's like 7 links there, so I'm just not gonna.
I think that's the key point. Decades of undermining the education system, plus many other problems such as "big money lobbying" is likely what led to such extremisms.
You know... the key metric of "education" used to be "what percentage of your population can read and write". By that measure, the US is fairly "educated". However, just like the value of each dollar goes down as the economy grows (i.e. inflation), I think it's important to apply a similar idea to education; just as the access to information increases, the value of _only_ being able to read and write is no longer enough to be considered as "educated".
New rule: if you’re going to disparage the other side and call them stupid, you have to find two nice things to say about their side.
It doesn't mean that all trump supporters are uneducated. But they do have a tendency to be uneducated. All the trump supporters I know are in that camp either for their extremist/nazi views, or due to misinformation, or for financial reasons. Those first two groups highly favor the uneducated.
Keep in mind my previous comment is in response to the original post, which talks about people on both sides having the "extreme mindset", i.e.:
> It's amazing. My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism.
Indeed, maybe I was wrong in suggesting that the poor education system is what caused this issue. But regardless, the ability to think critically is an important attribute, and I do believe extremisms are caused, in part, by the lack of it.
It might be more accurate to say that Americans need a better standard of education for history and civics.
You can see that behavior for example around the ACA. It's obviously inspired by Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care reform, so you'd think the Republicans would be all in favor of it. Yet at the federal level, since it was pitched by the Democrats, the Republicans are against it.
Because he wasn't the the fashionable choice for Democratic nomination (Sanders) he's reduced to being just an old guy who isn't Trump but is in the right party without anyone even bothering to even read his Wikipedia page or look up some of his speeches on youtube.
He's a passionate politician and an empathic speaker who has the experience to be a realist and appeal to republican voters too. He's exactly what is needed right now.
Sanders wouldn't have had a chance to get in, but even if he did he would just polarise things even further.
According to this Fox News poll[1], much of Bernie Sanders' platform would resonate with voters more so than Biden's platform.
I think this validates OP's point. He never said all Mexicans are rapists etc, he was speaking about border security and describing the people illegally entering the country through the Southern Border. One of many soundbites spun into a scandal by the media and used to dehumanize him.
His supporters understood what he meant, his detractors took the media spin hook, line, and sinker.
News does this all the time to generate outrage, both left and right leaning, and I absolutely HATE it. Particularly in the Trump and "fake news" era because it leaves them incredibly vulnerable to the criticism. "See! The fake-news, always lying!". Makes it easy to discredit their larger, more serious reporting by picking on these smaller transgressions.
He didn't say it, he insinuated it.
Is that really so different?
Yes he did.
It's not racist because of the exact words said, it's racist because of the obvious consequences. There are ways to talk about difficult issues. Trump empowered the worst people to come out from hiding.
The hook, line, and sinker is when he said, "and some, I assume, are good people." It's tantamount to, "I'm not racist. I have a black friend."
I think the loss of nuance to our political discussions is a disaster ...and I only see it getting worse. I believe there are good ideas on both sides of the aisle, but often feel like the only one with that viewpoint.
How can we fix this?
Centrists have it easier because they naturally see positive aspects of both sides, and that is exactly what is needed. If one can’t put themselves in the shoes of the other side and find a few strong legitimate and logical reasons they can connect with, then they really don’t understand what they are even fighting. You should be able to argue the other side. The reasons are there, and emotion only serves to blind us to them.
The rejection of basic facts, outright lies and contempt of science. I don't know how you can have a discourse in that environment.
The thing is, as a leftist I used to be able to have conversations with conservatives. We had different values, but a largely shared understanding of reality. That gave a common basis for contrast and discussion.
Now, that's gone. My biased perception is that the worst of it started on the right: a ways back Fox started creating a bubble of alternative reality, and that's been hugely amplified with the arrival of social media. I started struggling to communicate in meaningful ways. More recently I've found myself fact checking my own community more often than I used to - I wonder if Trump has sent leftists crazy in the same way that Obama did the right ;-).
Check out r/Libertarian sometime. After it was radicalized by self-professed fascist moderators and turned into a pro-Trump meme board, the admin stepped in and installed a moderation team that spent time coming up with rules to prevent the subreddit from being overrun by authoritarians again. They added legitimate left-libertarian[1] moderators, and there are left-libertarians users that post there.
I bring it up because it is the only conservative space I've seen that doesn't end up posting helicopter ride[2] memes at people they perceive to be even slightly to the left of them.
The sad thing here is that I'm genuinely open to having my opinions changed, and have a history of changing my view in response to argument in the past. But can't have my view changed if I'm too scared to even have the discussion ;-).
In 2009, they purposefully cropped video of the main protester outside an Obama town-hall meeting to only show his back and slung rifle, and then used the footage to immediately launch into a panel discussion positing that the primary motivation for the protests against Obama was racial animus. The protester was black.
Here is the footage (paired with another incident of egregious misreporting in 1992): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvBQDHqdCck
It's of course anecdotal, but after watching that with my own eyes I would find it very hard to believe that those links, threads and comments were developing organically.
For example, the conservative subreddit went from following the election to having the front page fully filled with claims of election fraud in matter of literal minutes, with sources coming from a million places at the same time.
Just like magic, suddenly the election being rigged went from a crazy idea to incontestable fact, and now for many people that's what happened, clear as day.
It was extremely scary to see,I still don't know what to make of it.
The House is Democratically controlled, but Republicans control the senate, so there's bipartisan agreement on this. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/technology/indictment-rus...
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
How many Cameroonian experts do the US based tech giants have to combat misinformation there?
Why don't you ask them?
Many countries let a little socialism slide, with great results.
A little racism should never be allowed to slide. Racism is disgusting.
But they aren’t the majority of either party. It’s just our media that amplifies their voices.
I blame Fox News for getting away with a decade of bad-faith claims of socialism towards things like mortgage assistance or Pre-K education.
Trump gained significant ground among racial minorities. So...IDK how to square that with your characterization of his 4 years of policies.
PS. Lest you think the right has a monopoly on racism, I point you no further than California's attempted repeal of discrimination law (Prop 209).
This is the same sort of inflated rhetoric/tribalism the grandparent was speaking of.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...
Kind of racist to say that, no?
Yes.
Top 5:
New Jersey New York Massachusetts Connecticut Louisiana
It's hard to have an intellectual debate in 120-character snippets on platforms that promote outrage over reason.
The bigger issue is retweet culture which pushes clickbait and anger inducing content.
The “centrist” view in America is extremely far to the right, which then allows factions like Trump’s to be far right to deeply fascist, racist extremes (this is not hyperbole, Trump is dangerously fascist) and yet still act like he’s just “on the right” because “centrist” positions in the US are themselves so deeply far right already.
The US really urgently needs more mainstream far left politicians, instead of nearly-Republican examples like Harris, Warren, Biden, Buttigieg, etc. AOC & Sanders are the closest, but by no means do they represent views that are anywhere near being a healthy “far left” ideology to help draw a compromise from the far right and towards a healthier centrist position.
“Centrist” in the US would at least be on the fence of letting individual own assault rifles, withdrawing federal funds for abortion, reducing the EPA and decommitting from international agreements on climate change, granting large tax breaks to corporations, eliminating social welfare programs for oppressed classes of people (in ways that overtly hurt the poor, minorities and women), and creating a legal chasm blocking any road to universal medical care, all while buying into jingoistic ideas about America being the best and dehumanizing other groups like immigrants and foreigners.
That’s the centrist position in the US. When anything further left is even suggested, the socialism boogeyman is drummed up and huge populations of people will vote against it for no other reason than “socialism bad.”
Any sense of acting like there’s a benign Republican core of ideas around states’ rights or lower taxes to be discussed in good faith is just gobsmackingly wrong about the US. That is just simply a falsehood.
What passes for middle of the road, “good faith” centrist discussion is deeply far right already, and “both-sides-ism” where “liberals claiming all Trump voters are racist” is disingenuously used to act like it’s “the same as” the behavior of the American far right is both completely wrong and contributing to the problem.
There are clear left and right viewpoints in the US with centrist usually being a fiscally conservative and socially liberal mix of policies.
I also reject the premise of your first point. It doesn’t matter what the current within-country standard for left and right are, that’s useless semantics. All that matters is outcomes in peoples’ lives.
A personal right to own assault rifles or limit federal funds for abortion (even if only for fiscal or states’ rights reasons) is emphatically far right in the sense of overall outcomes for lives, it does not matter what within-country label someone might want to call it by.
> "far right in the sense of overall outcomes for lives"
What's this even mean? You're now redefining the term into something entirely different.
Political labels (not within-country labels at a point in time) can be useful. Far right and far left have long-developed meanings in terms of broad policies they endorse and those policies have meanings in terms of the actual measurable impact on lives and human flourishing.
I feel your comment is not in good faith at all. Saying something like “what does this even mean” as a rhetorical deflection tactic when my comment was perfectly clear is very uncharitable and additionally it’s not contributing any new arguments or information, you’re just acting like the premise is unclear, but for no acceptable reason.
> "to be relative to some arbitrary standard"
That's what you were doing by saying the left isn't actually the left. Why? The left has a clear definition in the USA. You are redefining it for some reason.
> "Far right and far left have ... meanings in terms of the actual measurable impact on lives and human flourishing."
Yes, both extremes are generally terrible for lives. Was that the point? Otherwise no, I don't know what you mean. Perhaps you can answer instead of deflecting.
It doesn’t matter if the labels of right or left would have context within the colloquial definitions within a country and I am not “redefining” them by saying those reference points don’t matter.
There’s a superseding context in which far right and far left already have well understood definitions in terms of terminal values and how their policies map to those values. That exists outside of any given country or political unit.
> “The left has a clear definition in the USA.”
Uhhh no. That is not a reasonable thing to say. For example, Trump campaigned on the idea that Kamala Harris is extremely far left, but most people who identify as far left see her as basically just slightly left of center.
The idea there is a clear “left” in the US is itself a pure Republican propaganda construction just so it can paint Democrat candidates as “evil socialists” no matter their actual policies or how they map to the superseding notion of left-leaning politics.
Biden for example would have been a solid, firm Republican candidate ~35 years ago, even if running on a Democratic ticket.
My main point is that “center” in the US is already very far Republican-leaning and has shifted increasingly towards the right wing in the past 30 years, to the point that a very, very right-leaning Democrat like Biden is now sensationalized as being “far left” in election propaganda.
There is not actually any mainstream political group in the US that is really “far left” in the sense of offering a counterbalancing policy initiative that Republicans would have to significantly compromise away from their right wing core in order to engage with. Such a thing does not exist in the US.
You can play games of redefining words if you want and pretend like whatever position is occupied by the Democratic party thus, by definition, represents the “left” and thus represents a ideological separation from “the right” but it would just be falsely shifting definitions, it wouldn’t make “centrist” in the US to be any less far-right-leaning that what it really, actually is.
35 years ago the parties were a lot closer together because the Republican Party hadn't taken its jaunt into extremism that started in the 1990s, but, no Biden—who was then then to the right of his current position, was a solid Democrat then, though, like Clinton, part of the conservative Democratic Leadership Councl.
While Biden may have ideologically shifted left a small bit (changed views on criminal justice, climate policy), he’s still very close to the same point on the political spectrum he occupied 35 years ago. But now, because of the slide to extremism of the Republican party, Biden is suddenly caricatured as a socialist, far left boogeyman.
That’s not a function of the US Democratic party actually being far left leaning. It isn’t. It’s an expression of increasingly extreme far right positions of Republicans to shift the entire discussion massively to the right and redefine the center.
Any system where you define the center in such a way that Joe Biden is “far left” is a complete far right propaganda machine divorced of any acceptable or realistic definition of “centrists” or far left.
The first makes no sense and still lacks any explanation. The other two are arbitrary.
These parties are left-vs-right as of 2020 American politics. The definitions are dependent on the context of the time and place because politics change over time. They are also relative to each other; Left means left of the right, and vice versa. And center means in the middle of both. It's the current era that determines where the spectrum is actually anchored.
Why are you so insistent on using some other scale to label everything differently? What purpose does that serve? Is that not meaningless semantics?
I didn’t say these things. I have already provided more than adequate detailed explanations on all of these points.
> "but it would just be falsely shifting definitions, it wouldn’t make ... to be any less [than] what it really, actually is."
Alright then, since you claim to know what everything "really" is while overruling all the context then there's clearly no more discussion to be had.
If all you do is try rhetorical deflection by repeatedly saying previous comments weren’t clear when by any reasonable standard they were clear, you’re just arguing with yourself in an echo chamber and it’s not productive for people to engage with you.
You aren’t engaging with the clearly explained positions of my comments, you’re merely splicing quotes out of context and acting like you are entitled to question definitions of basic, widely agreed terms. Claiming subjectivity and confusion over definitions and then disingenuously acting like the other party is the one that’s changing definitions is not a valid argument. You’re just writing a lot of inflammatory verbiage to drum up confusion and selectively quote earlier comments to act like the position they represent isn’t consistent or clear even though it is.
Looking in your comment history it seems you have a very strong habit of doing this in many threads, often with a clear agenda favoring US right-leaning politics, so the most reasonable conclusion I can see is that you are trying to inflame confusion and derail otherwise valid points by converting them into endless semantic arguments about definitions just to support your existing biases.
I take great care in my discussions to be as objective and concise as possible, while focusing on the actual arguments and asking questions to get to the root of the matter. You clearly haven't read my thousands of comments on this site if you think otherwise. However I find that you constantly use the same "good faith" excuse every time. Why is that? If your position can't be clearly communicated and so easily breaks down under light questioning, then it's a failure of your position.
But since this isn't going anywhere, I'll end it here.
The very obvious point is that by using any consistent definition of left and right, either time-locked, global, or otherwise, the US doesn't have anything resembling a far-left party.
> Why are you so insistent on using some other scale to label everything differently? What purpose does that serve? Is that not meaningless semantics?
It forces people to recognize the extreme rightward shift in politics, and therefore the idea that appealing "to the center" is in fact an appeal to regress further to the right. This is something those on the right vehemently want to avoid admitting, since it prevents them from painting themselves as victims.
Those definitions aren't consistent, they're just different because the context is different. It's like general relativity, left vs right only exist in relation to something else.
> "forces people to recognize the extreme rightward shift in politics"
This is just strange. Politics change all the time in every dimension, just like people's values and opinions. Clinton was a Democrat who wanted strong borders and now the modern left wants open borders. Isn't that a shift to the left?
Everyone is aware that politics change over time. Nobody needs to recognize anything other than the policies and parties they identify with and want to have. If you can't discuss the policies and must use a party definition from decades ago then I don't see how this is anything but "painting [yourselves] as victims".
Yes, and the US Republican party is extremely far right, so labelling other parties solely in relation to US politics is not useful for discussing like actual political ideology.
It is, however, useful if you want to paint mainstream European political ideologies as socialism.
> Everyone is aware that politics change over time.
Then recognize that and be willing to have a discussion about politics in relation to time. If you refuse to engage with someone who points out that a political party or idea is not actual far left in the grand scheme of things, you are refusing to recognize the larger context.
In general, its difficult to have conversations without consistent definitions, and if the Republican party can change the definition of "left" by moving further to the right, this makes discussion of left politics hard, so people interested in discussing leftist politics have to reject that definition to have productive conversations.
If you don't want to have productive conversations with those people, that's your choice. But say that, don't claim they're being disingenuous.
> Clinton was a Democrat who wanted strong borders and now the modern left wants open borders. Isn't that a shift to the left?
Depending on exactly what you mean by "open borders", Sanders, who is conventionally considered left-of-the-median Democrat, wants less open borders than the democratic party as a whole. He's for freedom of movement of people, but for more tariffs and economic protectionism than the democratic party.
Trump and Sanders are actually sort of unique in this regard. Conventional Democrats and Republicans both favor free trade, although perhaps for different reasons. Trump, being anti-globalization does not, and Sander, being pro-labor, does not.
Again, in relation to what? It's the right, as according to current American politics because that's the context.
> "points out that a political party or idea is not actual far left in the grand scheme of things"
There is no "grand scheme" of things, you just picked a different context. Things would be different still if we went back to the Civil War or Ancient Greece.
> "productive conversations with those people, that's your choice. But say that, don't claim they're being disingenuous."
I'm not, I'm asking simple questions that go unanswered. The only reasoning I received was that you want people to recognize a shift. But since you claimed that the shift was being "ignored" as marketing and propaganda, isn't highlighting that shift effectively the same? I find it more so actually since politics changed naturally so it's the activist position to claim what the parties "really" are based on a selection from the past.
And immigration refers to people, not trade. Clinton made this speech [1] in 1995, but if any Democrat made the same speech today they would be vilified. That shows the left hasn't shifted to the right at all, they shifted even more to the left.
1. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4804493/user-clip-president-c...
The world. Historical American politics. A larger context. I'm repeating myself and you're ignoring it. Please stop asking questions that have already been answered. If you have objections to using a larger context, state them, but don't pretend I didn't answer your question already.
> Things would be different still if we went back to the Civil War or Ancient Greece.
Yes. You can pick specific contexts in which the modern american republican party was downright progressive. But you have to cherrypick those contexts, as you just did. Saying "world politics today" is a fairly objective measure, is it not? I mean there are even parties in Europe that are right-of-the-Republicans, so it isn't as though they're the furthest right. It's just that the Europeans call those parties fascist, and in some cases the parties embrace that label. Here people get annoyed when you do that.
> I'm not, I'm asking simple questions that go unanswered. The only reasoning I received was that you want people to recognize a shift. But since you claimed that the shift was being "ignored" as marketing and propaganda, isn't highlighting that shift effectively the same?
You're still ignoring it, and we're still discussing semantics, not politics. Do you want to have a productive conversation, or do you want to keep avoiding discussion of actual policies?
> I find it more so actually since politics changed naturally so it's the activist position to claim what the parties "really" are based on a selection from the past.
I can't parse this.
> And immigration refers to people, not trade. Clinton made this speech [1] in 1995, but if any Democrat made the same speech today they would be vilified. That shows the left hasn't shifted to the right at all, they shifted even more to the left.
This is the first time you said the word "immigration". I'm done.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/22/facts-about...
> “ Other proposals bring out stark partisan rifts. Democrats, for example, are much more likely than Republicans to favor banning assault-style weapons (88% vs. 50%) and high-capacity magazines (87% vs. 54%).”
You can also see in the charts in that link that even though a modest majority of all Americans believes there should be stricter gun laws, it is driven drastically by how dominant that view is among Democrats (86%) vs Republicans (where 69% say current gun laws are OK or are already too strict).
I only chose this topic because it refutes the falsehood that there’s some core of reasonable centrists in America - there’s totally not. Many issues are like this example of gun laws where it is extremely partisan and where one version of the extreme partisan divide is usually considered “centrist” (for example, belief that gun laws are mostly OK as-is, which is a really right wing belief but is seen as “centrist”) but it actually belies America being heavily shifted to the far right by default, so it’s not really center.
Anecdotally, I not only do not work with any of the former, but can't imagine a workplace that would suffer them. At the same time, I work with multiple people that are proud, self-proclaimed members of the latter group.
And as a european, I can tell you with high degree of certainty that absolutely zero of your friends or workmates are actually socialists or communists. It's possible they embrace socialist ideals, as Sanders does, but Sanders is at best a moderate left-wing here in europe.
You folks in the US developed a weird hatred of the word "socialism", equating it with the ridiculous dictatorial ideals of Stalin, Castro etc. But although socialism has a hard time working, that doesn't mean some of its ideas don't work in a democracy.
Here in europe, "free health care" is not socialism. It's a human right. Human rights are fun, you should try them.
Are you under the hallucination that I'm required to offer my services to the government so others can receive their surgery?
This is your problem, you have associated "socialism" with slavery, ergo you refuse to hear any arguments that has the word "social" in it because it's automatically bad by association.
Maybe start to accept that your fellow Americans don't actually want slavery, but maybe are instead unhappy with the completely fucking absurd and insane private health insurance system?
It is truly mind boggling, the mental jumps some of you folks are ready to make, to arrive at the conclusion that your life would be made worse were you to take example from countries that have it better than you. Because God forbid the US isn't number 1 in everything.
Now add 100% taxes. That's full-blown slavery.
Now cut the taxes to 50%. That's 50% slavery.
Like, seriously, you can't keep using public infrastructure and services and think taxes are slavery. The amount of shit you use daily that is funded by your taxes, hell, that is funded by my taxes as well from across the globe, is unreal. You would have to go find some virgin island and live off the land of you were to take this ridiculous argument to its logical conclusion.
And you're probably paying for private insurance right now. Either because you have to, or because your employer makes you. A socialized healthcare system would be more efficient and fair on everyone, you included. How do I know? I had to have sinusoidal surgery two years ago and didn't have to run a fucking indigogo campaign to pay for it.
Increasing taxes is not increasing slavery.
Decreasing taxes is not reducing slavery.
Socialized healthcare is not slavery.
Anyway, I'm reasonably confident that if we tallied the deaths resulting from racism and collectivism, collectivism would win handily.
It's not bad faith. You need to accept you are working off a different vocabulary. Your shitty media abuses this to stoke the divide.
Neither definition is more correct, but it stands to reason that people arguing in favour of "socialism in politics" aren't Stalinists, for fucks sake. If anyone tells you that, they are trying to rile you up. And if you believe them, you're a fool.
What is the worst possible interpretation of socialism, communism, collectivism, and the new Woke cult?
Is Biden not a centrist? He seems to be a right-of-center christian democrat like Merkel for example.
Just like in marketing it's all about how you frame a question to a person. Realistically most people share common beliefs at the fundamental level in what they want to see out of the power structures in our society. In other words, the vast majority of people in this country want to improve upon their material conditions. The rest of the circlejerk is just grifting.
Why would they care whether it has a meaning to you. They care about their own beliefs.
Based on the above, centrism (and indeed, being centre-left or centre-right) seems viable as a real belief that people can hold, not some strategy to appear above it all for social benefit, or as a stratagem used by someone actually highly partisan. A centrist's goals could be directly met by encouraging trial of different ideas across the political spectrum, and consistent meta-level rules rather than tribalist thinking. Trying to rise above the bunfighting isn't the benefit of centrist views, it's a necessity to enable the things they want to achieve.