The Democratic party aren’t actually centrist in most cases.
For reference I am literally in the bottom left corner.
/breaking-the-overton-window
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Endorsed, with a tangent:
I tend to think that the political compass graph needs a Z axis, for racism/xenophobia. It isn’t all about regulation and economics.
Was Kucinich really a socialist? I never gave him much attention.
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No one political party is going to be squarely in a neutral position for long, if ever. By centrist I mean the Democratic Party has got a lock on the left wing vote because the left simply has no viable alternatives and the party can also play to right wing values to pick up more support (thus Hillary Clinton’s milquetoast VP pick).
Reagan may have kicked off neo-liberal globalization, but the Democrats have become the guardians of it (recall that Obama was championing the TPP with rare support from establishment Republicans).
That’s the problem Democrats have. They’re literally playing to both left and right interests (and doing it badly) because there’s no one else to represent them while the GOP is off facing an existential crisis of how to put the white supremacist genie back in the bottle after rubbing on its lamp for decades.
I just don’t think you can continue in a two party system in these conditions. A liberal democracy can’t abide a binary choice between a political party devoted to maintaining it all by its lonesome and one devoted to ending it.
They aren’t.
Both major US parties are soon to be history; they’re the walking dead. Once the current crisis is resolved, whatever the successor parties are, it is very unlikely that they will be Democrats or Republicans.
The Republicans are dead because they’ve gone full fascist. As soon as they lose power, they’re destroyed.
The Democrats are dead because they’re hopelessly corrupt quislings, and the left has given up on them. They’re going down for essentially the same reasons as the Whigs did.
Nobody knows what the successor parties will be, but the DSA looks like a strong favourite to form the core of one of them. Still a long way to go, but things change fast in a revolutionary era.
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I recommend to you my prior post and also the dictum de omni et nullo, one of the classical “rules of thought” and the basis of all rational discourse.
Basically, since any statement applicable to all members of a set also applies to each member of a set, it is always both wrong and irrational to make a categorical statement covering all members of a category if you know of even one instance that contravenes the statement.
Or, more simply, it’s evil to characterize all people based on your perception of a subset. This is the fundamental error on which racism is based, for example - “all those people are alike even though it can be shown that they aren’t”. Don’t become what you are fighting - don’t be evil.
One of my best friends is very much a Republican, we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things as far as politics does but the times we do talk about politics we respect our differences. I don’t see myself as part of any particular political party, i think there’s deep problems with all political parties and movements. Even ones that i mostly support have their flaws.
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In my opinion you’re doing it right!
(Also in George Washington’s opinion - he had a few things to say about party loyalties and how they damaging they are to a society.)
For sure the 2 party system is fucked. I would not mind it if ultimately both parties deferred to one another with the ultimate goal of doing whats best for the country and its people. Neither party gives a damn about us, they want to get re-elected but they don’t really care about doing the most amount of good. There are a few good ones that are honest and genuinely care, but when the majority are only loyal to themselves and the party… well its no wonder why so many are disillusioned with our political process.
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By American standards, yes. By any other, probably not. He’s a hard-core, strongly principled liberal, respected by many conservatives for his integrity and insight. Sort of a less telegenic, less wealthy and less compromising Bernie Sanders.
I suspect that if Americans were to be presented with the choices they’d like, rather than the choices determined by economic players, the election of 2008 would have been between Ron Paul and Denis Kucinich. They presented two radically different approaches for confronting the same problems, problems that are of real concern to politically aware voters.
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Gosh, if only there was some sort of test we could give, asking if, say, one’s ideology and agenda are best represented by a party that advances an openly racist, homophobic, transphobic, income-inequality-creating, xenophobic, theocratic and increasing fascistic agenda! Oh wait, there is! It’s called Being. A. Fucking. Republican. (Note that this is different from simply registering as a Republican, which in itself means nothing.) Because we’re not talking about random groupings, like being redheads or Nickelback fans. We don’t ask “How do we know that a Nazi is a bad person?” We know because they’re fucking Nazis. Otherwise it’s all “not all Nazis!” and “Pointing out that Nazis are bad people makes you as bad as a Nazi!”
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So you’re saying you’re not all in for #notallnazis?
/s
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Watch out - I’m pretty sure that joking about Nazis makes you as bad as a Nazi, too!
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I just want you to know that you’re going to hell for that. You’re going to spend eternity next to people who make puns in socially awkward settings.
I think most people consider Republican to mean those people who’ve registered as Republican party members - but I do understand your point, and appreciate it!
How do you know that the political compass test measures anything real?
Consider this paper, if only to focus on its methodology.
Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the Cross-Racial Validity of the Child Rearing Scale
To be valid indicators of authoritarianism across racial groups, the child rearing items must first display measurement invariance. Invariance is a statistical property that ensures observed scores on an item(s) measure the same underlying trait on the same metric across groups (Brown 2006). Put another way, non-invariant measures make it difficult to analyze statistical results between groups since “. . . differences in regression coefficients or in means may be due to . . . a different understanding of the question items and not due to ‘true’ differences across groups” (Davidov 2009, 68). Hence, analyses of authoritarianism in racially diverse settings demand a measure that is invariant across racial groups (cf. Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Henry 2011).
I don’t think the political compass is designed as an invariant test. I suspect that it’s designed to demonstrate that politicians aren’t representative of popular opinion, just as similar tests are designed to recruit for the party. Hillary Clinton hasn’t personally taken the test. Instead someone else has read her campaign literature, and inferred how she might have answered, taking the quiz far more seriously than the average internet test taker.
Yes. I’m way to the left of Kucinich too. Do I think that Kucinich is a credible candidate? Uh, no.
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the thing i can’t figure is what it even means to be republican these days.
i heard a conservative commentator say a core - perhaps the core - belief is lowering taxes. but, what does that even mean? that’s a tool, not an end in and of itself.
im not even being snarky when i say the key requirement for being a republican at any level seems to be an absolute resolute desire to ignore facts. climate change, the failures of trickle down economics, private healthcare, private education, the biology of sexuality, the list is endless. ( rick perry wants to grow government to subsidize coal production? what the literal f_@$? )
what happened to actual conservative theory and principles? it seems to have all gone out the window in favor of racial, religious, and identity politics.
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Traditional conservatism in the sense of “maintain the status quo of wealth and power” is now the province of the centre-left of the Democrats. The Berniecrats are for gradual correction, the right-Dems are for gradual degradation.
The GOP are fascists.
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I agree that there are lots of faults with the Political Compass, but I haven’t seen anything better at explaining how floating voters are not the political centre. It also does a good job at showing how many “libertarian” candidates on the right are anything but when it comes to social issues.
Kucinich is only on there to show the positions of the 2008 primary candidates, it’s not meant to show if they are credible candidates. That would be a seperate axis, one that would be nearly impossible to quantify on an individual level.
I only mentioned my result to point out that there are people who do get results in that area of the chart. I actually redid the quiz answering honestly and seriously, and got the same result I have got as the various other times I have taken it in the last 10 years. When I first took the quiz years ago (it’s somewhere on an old Livejournal post) I got a result more in the Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn area, but my life was very different then.
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It means being a member of a team, a tribe, a cog in a machine, a part of something bigger than the individual.
As Karl Rove observed, we’re an empire now. The Republic is a hallowed memory piously invoked to sell cars and prevent colluseum rioting.
The party is a great machine, that exists in the same way unenlightened humans exist, simply to preserve itself, increase it’s dominance of resource allocation, and to consume. Except in the cases of outsider takeovers like Trump’s and Sanders’s (successful and unsuccessful, respectively) the people with high levels of control over the machine’s processes have been systematically conditioned to believe that the machine is virtuous enough to justify it’s excesses and inhumanities. Except in such rare cases as Trump, you can’t get to power without years of subservience to the machine; and even in such cases power corrupts.
If you haven’t already figured out that this is what people mean when they say the Democrats and Republicans are the same, you’re a partisan, a team player. The values and policies of the parties change fluidly to win elections and amass power; today, as @Wanderfound said, the Democrats are fascists and the Republicans are worse*. But tomorrow, just like today, they’ll be whatever they need to be in order maintain their cancerous, metastasized political machines.
* I’ll leave this error to stand, but see correction below.
