People look at that and miss that May got the most votes for the Tories since the war, except for Thatcher.
What actually happened was that third party support collapsed. Both tories and labour substantially increased their vote share. What’s important is the swing from Tories to the left, and Corbyn’s performance there was pretty modest. Corbyn’s success was not based on economic policy that helps the working class, but on doing better with well-to-do university educated young people.
And yeah, Hillary’s dems actually won the popular vote. Corbyn lost it by 2%. If Hillary did as ‘well’ as Corbyn, then the GOP would pretty much have a clean sweep of the US.
That is so incredibly rare (or at least - it has been) that we really don’t know how to deal with coalitions. FPTP is set up so that one party should get a majority. The fact that it hasn’t done so twice in recent years is testament to just how divided views are here.
Generally speaking our politics is a long stream of one side, then the other. Sometimes the parties change (Whigs/Tories; Liberals/Tories, Tories/Labour) but generally it is much the same as the US.
Mind you I suspect it is a little better than the US if only because we are a much smaller country (he said stating the bleeding obvious). Small parties can get a much greater amount of national exposure for much less money. Plus our campaign expenditures are peanuts compared to the US so all you need to have national exposure is a millionaire or two to back you rather than needing several billionaires, plus a few multinationals.
Hence you can get UKIP up and rolling for money that wouldn’t get you ads in Wyoming in the US (I’m totes guessing on the figures there but I’d be surprised if all the money spent on UKIP over the years amounted to one Presidential campaign’s worth in the US).
Really? I guess in recent years it’s become more common - or maybe it just seems that way? I mean, Cameron’s government had to align with the liberal democrats and now May is aligning with DUP.
This makes a huge difference in general. Corporations shouldn’t have such a big sway over elections here in the US.
That’s the problem, though, right? Groups like UKiP can have a real world influence on elections (even if they don’t win). It seems to me that the right wing has found a way to be more influential (in both the US and UK) than the left wing. Although we don’t have a right wing party that’s viable, people from the libertarian party and from the radical ethno-nationalist fringe have moved into the GOP here and are having measurable impacts on natioanal politics. It’s been years since a left wing party has had that influence on the Democratic party (going back to the progressives really).
The left (as in not liberals) have in most cases adopted intersectional thinking, perhaps tankies are the exception (“It’s all about class!”) and the right has long been a home for economic liberals- protectionism hasn’t really been a thing since the aftermath of WWI.
Nothing is more tragic than people suffering and dying because their bodies have been politically otherized.
As a leftist and staunch anti-capitalist, I can’t understand this sentence. Are you relating the “free” market to the freedoms that individuals and groups should enjoy? The free market is an idea (comprised of little more than utilitarian-rooted mumbo jumbo,) whereas humans are, well, both real and human. I’m anti-capitalist precisely because I think ideas like the free market significantly curtail human freedom. Not sure how that could make me a hypocrite.
Open to the possibility that I’m reading you wrong, but that’s certainly how it comes across to me.
This points out a problem with the two-party system we have. You choose one side, and hope that their social positions and economic positions and ethical positions all line up with yours.
Currently, as I see it, Republican=Right=Conservative=Capitalist, and Democrat=Left=Liberal=Socialist, but both parties are more influenced by lobbyists than their constituency, treat corporations as people and really good people at that, and have little concern about the big problems affecting future generations like environmental and educational issues, and global partnerships benefiting all.
Where does one stand, if neither party holds your particular social and economic leaning?
Look, I understand there is a preferred viewpoint here, and an in-group of preferred commenters, and that you number among them. Nonetheless, when you have an objection to a viewpoint posted in comments it’s still the done thing to explain your objection. One - two sentences is sufficient.
In this case it could be something along the lines of, “this is not the right way to look at this issue, nor the right way to talk about it. The Democratic Party nomination is in the distant past, politically speaking, and continually rehashing it is detrimental to our ability to fight the Trump agenda now, in real time.”
This is a valid objection, a valid argument. Vaguely haughty expressions of disdain or ‘exhausted’, superior irritation… are not.
Also, don’t artfully truncate quoted phrases so as to remove critical parts of them. “Establishment Democrats” and “Democrats” have significantly different meanings at present. And you are aware of this.
Sure.
I am extremely tired of listening to whining from people who cannot let go of how they perceive Bernie was treated during the primaries. There are so many issues facing America right now. So many pertinent items to worry about, to debate, to act on. Things we can actually do to move forward and actively help the situation at hand. Continuing to drone on and on about how the DNC acted nearly a year ago helps nobody. Let it go. It’s old news. Nobody cares. Move on.
I am not trying to ‘artfully truncate’ anything. I’m just quoting you and I couldn’t care less about the difference between those two terms in the context I’m speaking about.
You’ve got to understand that from the very beginning of the Cold War in the U.S.A. the word “socialism” was equated – via anti-Soviet propaganda which was largely funded by the emerging military industrial complex – to mean something decidedly anti-American, and therefore evil, menacing, and up to no good.
In fact, anyone who came out as a “socialist” would reflexively be under watch by the FBI, and prominent and famous people – e.g. in Hollywood – who came out as either “communist” or “socialist” would be in danger of industry blacklisting, that is to say they would not be able to get a job in whatever their trade in retaliation for holding beliefs anathema to the State.
So to my generation – the last to live during the Cold War – that word is very loaded. To this day, on the political right, the word “socialism” is still demonized, so it’s not very effective. That’s changing, but rather slowly.
That sounds more like Tony Blair’s third way to me.
Note that I am working class and don’t have a university degree (I can’t afford it, and I would have been in the first year to have tuition fees if I hadn’t become ill). I am also way to the left of Jeremy Corbyn.
I obtained my Masters degree from a university heavily funded by the Kochs. Though I didn’t study economics, I suspect that I may have been exposed to the mathematical apparatus behind neoliberal ideology.
The economy can be thought of as the system by which goods and services are allocated. This system can be efficient, or it can be inefficient, depending on how it is structured and managed. It tends to be a complex, chaotic system, and there is a strong argument to be made that the complexity is critical to this proper functioning of the economy. Complexity emerges from a multiplicity of actors acting according to local knowledge, and relatively simple rules-- and not from the top down.
If one attempts to simulate the state of the economy using a oversimplified model, the error rate will be significant, and if one uses this simulation to actually control and manage the economy, supplies of various goods and services won’t come close to matching demand. To extend this sort of analysis further, the freer the market, the better suited it is to matching buyers and sellers.
On a more abstract level, liberal political societies are based on the idea that political problems are best suited by ensuring that as many political actors as possible are involved in making decisions, that political actors are drawn from the society at large, and that political actors act as individuals. One could argue that that this parallels the role of individual buyers and sellers in a free market–except that neoliberal political theorists tend to argue that the state (never mind how liberal) be dismantled as it has the capacity to interfere with the “free market.”
Yes, I do understand that, and as I said – that’s basically symptomatic of provincialism. If most Americans had a less-blinkered view of politics and other political ideologies and systems, as people generally do in many other countries, then “socialism” wouldn’t strike so many of them as the mark of the Devil and so on.
It’s good to see though that, as you say, it’s changing (as in the greater support among young people for a man who’s sometimes not afraid of the word, Bernie Sanders).
As indicated above I actually agree with this, and had hesitated to post specifically about the Las Vegas incident, although it is still of interest to me as a Nevada Democrat. Quite a few of the individuals involved are still influential in the party here, including the former assemblywoman who made false statements about it in her RN&R column (the 2nd link above).
The centrist, elite Democrat-affiliated media is not ‘letting go’, not at all. Nor is the Democratic Party elite. They presently put more energy into blocking Sanders-affiliated people from power than they do into combating the Administration on many critical issues. Some of this is inevitable; they control their party apparatus and have very little influence (much less control) on federal government policies. However, as long as this political dynamic prevails, some “rehashing” is inevitable and warranted, because the events of 2016 pertain to current events. If that weren’t the case, an article like Saval’s would never have been published in the New York Times at this point in time.
well my position on many topics is liberal, or even libertarian, I just don’t think of myself as “a liberal” due to the aforementioned scratch a liberal and there is a Tory underneath.
Scratch a liberal and there is a tory underneath. They went from one party to the other from Gladstone to Churchill and they were always really conservatives. Free trade conservatives.
A liberal is a tory that wants to try and be “nice”. The whole fucking point of being a Tory is to be a complete bastard and take everything because you can and therefore deserve it. The “nice” part of the liberals always fell apart under the slightest pressure. The repeated failure of the liberals to deliver what they knew, and professed, to be right for example to women’s movements or to Irish movements led to the alliances of women, workers, and republicans which formed the successful radical politics of the 20th century.
That a century later many people are rediscovering this again is interesting.
In the microcosm of the 1980’s-2010’s, like I mentioned up thread, we wore the “liberal” badge quite proudly (liberal being socialist’s less evil, more effete and ineffectual cousin).
“Maine’s fun-loving Republican governor Paul LePage implied that he makes up stories to confuse the press; in a radio interview, he also said “the sooner the print press goes away, the better society will be.”
Wait.
What. The. Utter. Fuck???
What the hell is going on?!? Less than thirty years ago, we were all excited about the fall of the Soviet Union and that Communism failed! Horsy for Democracy and here we are with an entire party seemingly hell- bent in imposing the most odious aspects of Soviet rule Stateside. Why the FUCK isn’t anybody listening to asshole like LePage and telling him to fuck right off with nonsense like this!
Has this been bubbling under lol along or has America lost its collective mind in 2017?!?
Thats not how I see it. Capitalism is merely exploiting situations to its best degree. This is of course how we should do anything well. Its just human nature to take advantage of nature. Socialism is a human construct just like health and safety laws. It slows down production but without it people will get hurt , the environment gets destroyed, inequality tips the scales beyond an efficient system. Capitalism and socialism are complimentary but no one on either side has the guts to say this!
As far as Im concerned things have been tipped way onto the capitalist side. In modern times starting with post war anti communist political agenda and then going all the way once the cold war had finished. Finally causing the crash and ramming austerity through to protect the rich. Protecting the rich is no more free market capitalism than china is communist.
You can never “fix” prejudice, you can only take power away from those to wield over others.
The reason these issues still persist decade after decade is because they are not even on the radar of those who really call the shots. It doesn’t cost them anything to ignore, which means it could go on for centuries, trying to tweak the power balance, after the fact, and wondering why nothing is really changing.
