Comment by hagbard_c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hagbard_c | Hacker News Reader

It would have been more succinct to list the Germans who are allowed to use this product given the current polls:

    ~25% AfD
    ~25% CDU/CSU aka "AfD mit Substanz"
         CSU
    ???  Werteunion
    ???  Die Heimat
    ???  Die Basis
    ???  Freie Wähler
    ???  BündnisDeutschland
    ~4%  Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht

This means more than half the German voting population is not welcome.

It seems that this software is only to be used by those on the left side of the political spectrum but not everyone on the left - Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is certainly on the left but she does not pass the mustard. SPD/Linke (the former eastern German communist party for those who don't know their history - the party which was responsible for ordering people to be shot for the 'crime' of wanting to leave the country) and the Grüne ('Greens', just like water melons they are green only on the outside but deep red on the inside) are welcome as are those remaining few FDP (a liberal party) voters. I don't know the other parties - Werteunion, Heimat, Basis, Freie Wähler and Bündnis Deutschland - but since they don't show up in the polls they're not that interesting in this context.

> It seems that this software is only to be used by those on the left side of the political spectrum

Democrats aren't on the left side of the political spectrum, but it appears they can use this software. (Yes, they are called the left in the US, but the mainstream positions of the Democratic party are globally center or center-right.)

But also, I would argue that modern leftist parties tend to be less interested in human rights violations and more interested in taking care of everyone (even if that means taking wealth away from the wealthy, which many would consider violative but probably isn't "contempt for human rights")

As far as economic policy goes Democrats are neoliberals (which can be considered right wing).

They are far left on cultural topics (e.g. favoring retributive discrimination, wanting frivolous late term abortions to be legal) and far left in their attempted "solutions" to issues like homelessness (rewarding what they try to stop), crime (not enforcing the law if it would make client groups look bad, e.g. making theft under $1k a misdemeanor), education (e.g. abolishing measures of competence).

Some of that is performative, some of it is clientelism. But there are a lot of influential Democrat positions are held by sincere (cultural) leftists.

> favoring retributive discrimination, wanting frivolous late term abortions to be legal, etc.

I don't think these are the positions held by the Democrat party at large. I don't deny they exist within the party, but this isn't what a Biden or Pelosi are pushing for.

The "democrat" party at large does not have a position because the Party is too fractured. From the screeching Banshees with weird hair colours and piercings who frequent all paid-for protests to the out-of-work mill working man, from the race grifters in academia to the well-meaning but ill-informed librarian in some prairie town, from the in-and-in corrupt politico syphoning off funds for her own purposes to the sheriff who just wants his county to be a safe place for all who happen to be there, who represents them in the current DNC? Who will they follow as their next leader, trusting that (most likely) she will have their interests at heart? The Party does not know because the Party has purged itself of believable candidates because they did not fit the narrative - too male, too Jewish, too sensible. By 'centring the marginalised' - their own term - they lost focus of the fact that there will always be people on the margins who in their turn will demand to be at the centre which ends up marginalising the centre which happens to be where the majority of their potential voters reside. This is why I have been calling for the Party to burn itself down to the ground so that a new (capital-D small-p) Democratic party can arise to function as effective opposition to the Republican party. While I may not be an American I do have some skin in the game since I prefer that big neighbour on the other side of the ocean to remain stable without veering off too far in either direction. Without a functioning capital-D Democratic party the risk is for the country to veer off towards whatever faction ends up taking over the Republican party once Trump has run his course in about 3½ years.

I've never encountered a radical centrist in the wild before. Now I can say I have. Fascinating.

But the politics of the Dems are absolutely pro-capital, pro-moderate, pro-"nothing fundamentally changes". Biden, Obama, Harris, and Clinton were all "let's not make any radical shifts here, the markets will sort us out, we just need some easily ignorable guard rails on them" candidates.

I don't think the party, at the national level, contains many leftists. Perhaps Sanders (though I think of him as a soc-dem, not a dem-soc, based on his policy positions), and he's not even a member of the party anymore.

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