Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

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Kamala Harris's voting record is extremely progressive. Nevermind the subjective approximation of her policy positions as the Democrat nominee, which was watered down as she tried to garner broader support compared to her 2020 primary run.

>The Voteview project (now based at UCLA) has, since the 1980s, employed the roll-call votes cast in Congress to locate all senators and representatives on a liberal-conservative ideological map. These data and methods have been utilized by academics in thousands of peer-reviewed books, book chapters and journal articles. Although no method is perfect, there is a general consensus within the academic community that the NOMINATE methodology employed by the Voteview project and its close cousins represent the gold standard.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-i...

You can look at the data yourself: https://voteview.com/data

And its not shocking right? She represented California, which is obviously one of, if not the most, liberal state in the country.

This places her on a spectrum where the farthest left you can go is the most left leaning US Democratic senator, which is not very "progressive" in the context of western politics as I mentioned in my last comment.

Yeah, exactly. When someone like Bernie Sanders talks about the economy and big corporations today, they sound a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a full-on capitalist and proud of it, and definitely would not have been understood as a "leftist" at the time. He believed the USA government's job was to act as a strong, firm check against the worst tendencies of capitalism (like monopolization), but only so that capitalism could function at its best. There were many at the time who did not believe capitalism was really the way to go, though! Just look at organizations like the IWW, and the various worldviews that were sympathetic to the rise of the USSR just a few years later. Hell, one of the people who ran against Teddy Roosevelt was Eugene Debs, a socialist who got more than an insignificant number of votes.

But 100+ years later, a Teddy Roosevelt-esque understanding of government and capitalism is the furthest left USA politics can imagine.

s/Democrat nominee/Democratic nominee/g

or

s/Democrat nominee/nominee for the Democrats/g

"Democrat" is a long-used general US political slang to refer to an individual member of the Democratic Party (or to refer to a collective of individual members if used as the plural "Democrats"). In the past few decades right-wing commentators have made frequent improper use of the slang to refer to the official party, partly due to its easy association with negative words such as "autocrat" and "plutocrat", resulting in the common misuse of the slang. However, there is no such thing as the "Democrat Party" or "Democrat nominee".

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