How was that compass generated? I have serious disagreements with its positions.
Take the candidates recent statements on a position, run them through the quiz.
Which areā¦?
1 Like
Some insider dems are always panicking. Actually, I could generalize that more to āsome insiders are always panickingā.
I mean, you how many āinsider republicansā are panicking over their nominee? Which side has better reason to panic? I mean, youāve got a dude who just has officially wrapped up the nomination for his party, but who has managed to get into a spat with a Federal judge by calling him a Mexican, got called to carpet on a scheme to rip off a bunch of veterans and keeps on calling Elizabeth Warren āPocahontasā. And on the other, you have a woman who has not quite wrapped up the nomination (but probably will in Californiaā¦ sheād have to be destroyed in a primary, not a caucus, for it to be otherwise[^](And seriously, Bernie Sandersā advantage is with the educated, high information voters who attend caucuses and care deeply about politics. Unfortunately, these arenāt the people who comprise the majority of voters in an election.)), but is still fending off attacks from her challenger. Me, Iām just hoping that Trump doesnāt get his head out of his ass, like, ever so he can be blown out in spectacular fashion, but at the very least, the press is out to get him even more than they are out to get Hilary now. āAllā Hilary has to do is look dignified and keep calm about the whole Whitewater and Vince Foster messā¦
1 Like
Hey, whereās Obama on this chart?
Was he a candidate in 2004 or 2016?
Try these.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012
1 Like
No, but it would be pretty damn relevant to have him on the chart, even if itās an approximation. Just so I can calibrate shit.
1 Like
I didnāt make the charts, just merged them, and one of them was made in 2004. Try the two links I gave, itās your choice which one is more accurate.
1 Like
That quiz takes a lot longer than 5 minutes but Iām suspicious of the fact it ranks the NDP, the party that is too left wing for Canada, as a party in the dead centre.
Maybe itās correct that Clinton is Conservative by some global spectrum. But by that measure so is the Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
So is that really giving you a meaningful definition of Conservative for the US?
Oh, and another fun fact. To go by that chart Bernie Sanders is way too far left to win a national election in Canada.
Sheāll like put out a rather middle of the road SCOTUS, unlikely to change the status quo regarding economic issues (such as overturning the notion of corporations being people and speech being money), but who will be progressive on social issues and will uphold things like gay marriage rights and the general interpretation of Roe V. Wade.
2 Likes
3 Likes
Tell that to Scandinavia [ETA for grammar dumbness]!
3 Likes
By a European standard, or the US/UK standard from before 1980. It gave me a score of -9.63,-9.03 earlier today, some of us havenāt given in to the neo-liberals yet. Call me a communist or an anarchist if you like, I wonāt care.
It shows that there is an obvious drift to the authoritarian right in the two main parties. Could you imagine Eisenhower doing what he did as president if he were in todayās Republican party? Even Nixon comes across as left wing by todayās standards.
1 Like
We were at a friendās house the other day and for some reason our host put Fox Business on while we were talking (I didnāt ask why; no one (besides me) seemed to actually be paying attention).
There was a show with Jon Stossel, and he had a guest from the Cato Inst. who claimed that socialism in the Nordic states was a myth, that they actually have liberal economies and this is what enables them to have national health care etc. I have to say thatās a new one on me! And itās the first Iāve heard from the likes of Cato that laissez-faire economics would enable welfare state-type measures, much less that theyād desire that kind of thing.
In hindsight I shouldāve politely asked to put it back on college softball that Iād been semi-watching.
3 Likes
By Australian standards, Clinton would be to the right of our right-wing parties on foreign policy, centre-right on economics and amongst the less-conservative wing of the conservatives on social policy.
Sanders is a completely non-radical centre-left social democrat. The Republicans range between the extreme right of our conservatives and the sort of views that we only see in criminal hate groups. Trump is an urbanised and louder version of the sort of ignorant racist rural independent that our system occasionally throws up when the farmers get overly annoyed with their local conservative.
5 Likes
the meaning of the word ādemocracyā has changed from its classical bent too. You could say that the only truly (classicly) democratic organ in american government is the jury, as that is selected by a lottery.
And political science gives narrow technical meanings to common phrases: liberalism often refers to social contract theory, republicanism to ācivic republicanismā, (as exemplefied by rennaissance italy)
I can actually answer this one from personal experience. When my friend and I went to the Sanders rally that was held in my city, there were all kinds of characters there, and it was a very energetic atmosphere with lots of conversations between strangers going on ā naturally, since people knew that they had a certain perspective in common. But there was one guy who I noted while coming in and getting seated. He was wearing a āMake America Great Againā hat! Lots of people were looking at him, regarding him with suspicion, you could tell. Wouldnāt you know, there were practically no seats left and this guy ended up sitting right next to me! He applauded along with everyone, much of the time. There were a couple times he booed or gave a thumbs down, but not many. However, not a single person said a word to him, except for when some campaign volunteers introduced themselves after he sat down, which was clearly just to kind of size this guy up and try to determine if he was there to make a scene. They were polite. But if I had been this dude, I would have felt pretty damn unwelcome. And I thought that all of that was just as it should be (the Sanders campaign has little to gain by going after the tiny population of people who might be persuadable Trump voters, even where there are open primaries).
[quote]
But the anti-elitist sentiment that also drove Trump and Ted Cruz, I think it exists in both parties and itās the main driving force behind Sanders.[/quote]
I would almost call this a logical error. The anti-elitism is a characteristic only, shared by two groups that have different reasons for being, and different goals. So you canāt regard this characteristic as a common ādriving force.ā
This is that Fareed Zakaria nonsense about how democracy (or as he puts it, āconstitutional liberalismā) will get along just fine even as, with popular indifference, mass political involvement withers away. Because we have āpolicy elitesā and professional associations and so on. Few seem to recognize what a wholesale abandonment of first principles this is. If you think ordinary people canāt debate single-payer, for instance, then you have given up on what I consider to be democracy, and youāre probably seeking to redefine it as something else. (See āRuling the Void: the Hollowing of Western Democracyā by Peter Mair.)
4 Likes
Iāve heard this before, the Nordic model.
I think the concept is that the business environment is lightly regulated, corporations are big and profitable, and hiring/firing is easy (though conversely thereās also a lot of unions).
The healthy business environment then enables the welfare state.
Not being an economist I donāt know how good this interpretation is. Though Iām skeptical that the US would be open to the same level of welfare state.
The thing with the Nordic countries is they tend to be veryā¦ Nordic. Itās a lot easier to sell a big welfare state with redistribution when the recipients look like you and share your culture. When the country gets a lot of poor minorities the rich majority starts seeing redistribution as taking money from their cultural group and giving it to the other cultural group.
I think thatās a lot of the reason Republicanās resist the welfare state so much while defending medicare and social security. Itās not that they donāt want their money going to help poor people, they just donāt want their money going to help those āotherā poor people who are part of their group.
Iām not sure thereās something fundamentally different between Nordic people and Americans on this front, itās just that the Nords donāt care as much because thereās fewer of those āotherā people around.
Thatās what threw me ā Cato, et al seem about as amenable to this as they would be toward a sack full of warm venereal disease.
1 Like
Iām not sure about that, a lot of Sanderās rhetoric, and certainly that of his supporters, is very specifically targeted against the idea of elites thinking they know better, and claiming corruption when elites disagree. Iād say itās a bigger driving force than his economic policy and thereās some backing to this. In this study out of 15 issues the biggest difference between Clinton and Sanders supporters was how critical they were of the system.
As another test I figured that Europe, being much less anti-elitist than the US, would be relatively pro-Hillary. I was correct:
Itās about balance. You donāt want people completely disengaged or the government gets captured by elites and special interests.
But if people start shutting out elite opinion entirely the elites and special interest just switch to controlling things by manipulating the public instead.
Thatās part of the reason why Trump was able to dump so much of the conservative platform, itās because a lot of Republicans were never really conservative. The Koch brothers and other ideological special interests had managed to manipulate the Republican base into ignoring the conservative elites in favour of an ideological purity test it didnāt even like.
2 Likes
I feel that the conflation of ācritical of the systemā and āanti-elitistā is somewhat misguided. And that much rhetoric around āelitesā ignores or obfuscates the distinction between cultural, intellectual and financial elites.
1 Like
