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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

You know people are actually Republicans, right? You think what they want is for big companies to loot the government? That sounds like you view Republicans as the villains on Captain Planet.

The Republican position is probably more like "With less regulation more companies could flourish and compete in the same space and then market forces would drive costs down" and less about wanting to steal from people.

It's crazy to think ~half the country just wants to empower big business to rob them. Not least because big business tends to support Democrats.

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I assumed by "Republicans" they meant Republican politicans and the wealthy entities that support them, rather than party members (the general populace).

You say that as though SF hasn't been run exclusively by democrats for 30+ years. Democrat politicians care as little for their constituents as republican.

Y’all are funny in there (US). Every time someone argues that “democratic politicians this” or “republican politicians that” the rest of the world looks at each other like “do they think that they actually have two different parties?”

Even based on public policy (and ignoring how their private actions), US democrats are closer to “global centre” but still in many cases to the right of centre.

You don’t speak for the rest of the world. And no, democrats are not to the right of center.

Where do you suppose center is?

On what issue? Democrats are to the left of the developed world on most social issues. For example, in the EU, neither abortion nor same-sex marriage are recognized as inalienable rights, but rather are afforded as legislative prerogatives: https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2015-09-14/eur..., https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-right-to-abortion-and-the-...

On economic issues, the Democrat mainstream is center to center right compared to Europe. But overlook that social democracies in Europe went through a long conservative retrenchment after the 1960s and 1970s. Look at the corporate tax rates in Sweden.

On absolute terms. Among the salient issues, what would a center platform entail? The reason I bring this up is because we can then compare your idea of center to examples world wide. I'm specifically challenging you to enumerate your position so that we can escape the, "Well it just is center," circles we would otherwise run in, or the relative terms we seem to be talking about now.

I gave you concrete examples. In particular, on social issues American democrats are on the far left globally because of how they conceive of those issues. They view of abortion or same sex marriage as individual rights that trump society’s power to regulate. By contrast, in most countries where abortion or same sex marriage is permissible, it’s because society has chosen to allow it, subject to whatever circumstances and conditions society has chosen to impose. Abortions, for example, are widely available in Japan to 24 weeks. But that’s because of WWII-era rules put in place by the government to control population growth. The Japanese largely do not think of abortion in terms of society lacking the power to prohibit abortion, as American democrats do.

I don't agree. I'm asking for a response in the form of "Global center for issue X is..." Instead I've received a "Part A is left of center, Party B is right of center." So no, I don't think I've been given what I asked for.

That is what I gave you. The “global center” on social issues is that the public, through the government, has the prerogative to regulate personal and social morality. They have the power to regulate abortion, who can get married, what kind of birth control is available, etc., based on social consensus. Even countries that choose to allow certain things, typically do so as an exercise of that prerogative, not as a matter of “individual rights.”

I can't help but feel I'm getting XY Problem-ed here. Thanks for trying, but I'm apparently not capable of communicating clearly enough to get what I'm asking for.

You want a quantitative answer to something qualitative - it doesn’t make that much sense to ask for an answer in such a way.

If you want to decide the center yourself on every issue then you’d have to take true and accurate surveys of a global population and then stratify them for their various biases (religious or cultural or whatever) then further stratify each cohort by age, family, gender, sexual orientation, and many other variables. The idealogical center to your surveys will just be the mode for your various questions, if true

Now

At least democrats do not want to take away women's and gay rights.

I doubt all republicns want that either, the problem is that 2 party system makes it all the same which is insane.

Not even the majority want same-sex marriage to be illegal, but only 55% of Republicans support same-sex marriage. That's a low number. 60% of republicans want abortion to be illegal.

> It's crazy to think ~half the country just wants to empower big business to rob them.

You'r right. It's more like 90% of the representatives. The republicans are just more brazen about it.

Why do people still believe that lie? That deregulation leads to a market environment that wont just be dominated by existing whales.

Republicans lately do not operate in good faith. At least the federally elected ones.

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