Isn’t racism about liberties?
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…which brings us back around to the oversimplification surveys (and 2-dimensional politics) represent. But I’d put racism/tolerance on the left-right spectrum, not egalitarian-authoritarian spectrum.
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I’d say it’s a bit of both. It’s simultaneously denying people some degree of freedom, and it’s a lack of equality.
But then I believe that freedom and equality need to go together, because one without the other eventually turns oppressive.
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Not sure what you’re referring to. Tell me what happens.
Does it affect the power their party is given as a majority?
well, if nothing else he developed a formal description of language that helped advance computer programming and compiler design faster than they would have otherwise.
radicals can be helpful sometimes after all, i guess.
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Well, what historically tended to happen with the Conservatives is that they become very disciplined when things are tight vote-wise. The whips crack down, the backbenchers get told to wind their necks in and vote the party line and they usually do. Good of the party and all that.
When their party has a large majority, the party has a lot more trouble with backbenchers because there isn’t much pressure you can put on them.
You can’t appeal to them on the basis of “Every vote counts” because it clearly doesn’t.
You can’t realistically offer them a job (i.e. a ministerial post) because if you have a large majority you’ve already got far too many people to find jobs for anyway and if your obstreperous MP hasn’t already got one, it’s because you already think he or she is far too incompetent, callow or ideologically bonkers to be given one.
You can threaten them with deselection but given that if the backbencher is grandstanding, it’ll be because they think it plays well in their constituency, that’s not much of a threat. Chances are they’ll just tell you to go ahead and say they’ll run as an independent or (worse) join UKIP.
You may have some material on them for blackmail but that’s not so much done these days given that all sorts of things that used to be so scandalous it’d lose people their career in politics are now shrugged off.
It’s also risky since anything that is still sufficient to put real pressure on an MP is also red-hot enough that it’ll burn the party if it comes out. These days I gather it’s best for the whips not to know.
It’s obviously not just the Tories this happens to - Tony Blair had huge problems with his backbenchers after he won his ginormous majorities - but the Tories are, anecdotally at least, the party that tends to rally round in adversity. The other parties will happily tear each other to shreds even if they’re on the outs politically.
That’s for example why the Tory leadership election went the way it did. Bunch of candidates put themselves forward, followed by a relatively quiet and above all quick bout of mutual backstabbing, leaving one candidate for election who even though clearly no one actually thinks she’s doing a decent job, no one has challenged or (in my view) will challenge barring some major upheaval or crisis.
Contrast with the Labour leadership election.
The present situation is a little unusual in that we have Brexit complicating everything. There are a whole bunch of MPs worried that not being seen to be slaveringly pro-Brexit (rah! Rah! rah!) will lose them their seat and that worry is big enough that it overrides party loyalty (which I think is quite low for many of them in any case after Cameron’s attempts to persuade the country that the Tories do actually live in this century).
At the moment MPs can say all sorts of stuff about how the Brexit negotiations are not being handled properly - as long as they all vote in favour of legislation put forward by the party, that’s going to be let slide. Since all meaningful legislation is Brexit-related, they’re fine with that.
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No, it isn’t. Racism is a complicated issue. When a no-touch soap dispenser doesn’t give out soap to dark-skinned people because the people who made it simply forgot there were such things as non-white people during the testing phase, that’s racism in action but it clearly has nothing to do with liberties.
The relationship between racism and rights is that racism has taken the form of explicit denial of rights. Obviously when black people can’t vote that’s racism and it’s a rights issue. That some issues are both doesn’t make racism a subset of rights.
It’s perfectly possible to be anti-racist without caring at all about liberties. You may think that’s a position that would have bad effects in reality, but they are still distinct. Apples are good for you and poisoned apples are not, we don’t think apples are “about poison”.
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A few problems with this.
During the times when Jim Crow system was in place in the US, people were arrested for using “white only” facilities. They broke the law (and were right to do so), putting them in the group of people “who think radical, illegal, or lethal action is required to correct things.”
You have just said that according to horseshoe theory the civil rights activists are nearly identical to the Klan and people who got nostalgic for the days of slavery. You said it in the quoted text above. Martin Luther King was most definitely not a moderate under your scale, what he advocated was both radical and illegal as well as non-violent which is why he was assassinated. He was too much of a threat to the status quo.
A more current example.
The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (Rojava) are fighting against ISIS in Syria. The Rojavan government is illegal under Syrian law. Under your proposed scale Rojava, with its democratic voting system and egalitarianism is nearly identical to a reactionary religious organisation. Just as worryingly, the Ba’athist dictatorship of Syria would be classed as centrist on your scale, as they are the status quo. Waiting for justice to naturally happen under either al-Assad or ISIS is pointless, it isn’t going to happen.
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Another consideration is that I’m not sure if the non-radical thing works. Would MLK (yes I knew he became more radical in his later years,) have been received as he was and the “nice” civil rights movement be as successful as it was without the BPP there to look threatening and genuinely threaten existing power structures with free breakfast? I’m not as sure about India, but if I recall there was a fair amount of rebellion in the air if not on the ground when Gandhi and his followers started sounding like an awfully reasonable and good plan. India still has maoist rebels to this day according to Wikipedia, I’m sure they didn’t come from nowhere. A moderate movement on its own is easy to dismiss, a moderate movement partnered with an extremist one seems to be useful in accomplishing the moderate movement’s goals as the “reasonable” people.
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High five.
Economic Left/Right: -9.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.59
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Do you think Bernie delights in control and power…?
And that, more than anything else as you note (except maybe Britain’s inability of hold an empire together after the world wars and depression), was part of why they succeeded. It wasn’t just tactics on their part, it was also because the alternative was more bloody and costly. Same with King - the alternative was the more radical black nationalism that was percolating at the same time.
And I think you also underestimate just how much white America really hated King, especially law enforcement. He wasn’t radical in the few years before he died, calling for full tilt, immediate integration of all of America was a deeply radical act. Just because he used words that spoke of love and non-violent action instead of violent overthrow of white supremacy doesn’t mean that he wasn’t radical from the get go.
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That was actually the point I was trying to make with the post, it’s just that my remembrance of the violent resistance in India is less clear and a quick search wasn’t giving me much 
This one’s totally on me, though: letting the modern perspective leak into the past. King was definitely only moderate when compared to the black nationalist competition. If I had to guess, moderate voices at the time probably would’ve been advocating something like toning down “separate but equal” a little bit. You can go to the same school and be in the same building, but the water fountains and classes are still separate, stuff like that. Restoration to the rights of the 1870’s was a huge deal.
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the only time the american right (despite your insistence that it’s all to the right, there really is a distinguishable right between the political parties) references king it is too slander him by saying “you know he was really a conservative” or “king wouldn’t have had any patience with radicals like black lives matter because he was really a conservative.”
I never said otherwise; the GOP are fascists, the Dems are imperialist liberals.
Both right of centre, both catastrophic, but not the same. Which is why I spent the primaries advocating for Bernie, and the election (reluctantly) advocating a vote for Clinton. And why I currently support the entryism of the DSA.
Whereas the American liberal centre primarily references King in order to silence the left, by falsely portraying MLK as a milquetoast champion of polite reformism and respectability politics.
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Even then, it was primarily a difference of opinion over tactics. MLK was a revolutionary socialist.
Another example of this radical historical whitewashing is provided by America’s own Martin Luther King, Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech is routinely broadcast and praised across the land on the national holiday named for him. In the official, domesticated version of King’s life, the great civil rights leader sought little more than the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation and voting rights for blacks in the U.S. South. Beyond these victories, the “good Negro” that American ideological authorities wish for King to have been only wanted whites to be nicer to a select few African-Americans – giving some small number of trusted blacks highly visible public positions (Secretary of State?), places on the Ten O’Clock News Team, the right to manage a baseball team and/or an occasional Academy Award and/or their own television show.
How many Americans know that King was rather unimpressed by his movement’s mid-1960s triumphs over southern racism (and his own 1964 Nobel Prize), viewing the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts as relatively partial and merely bourgeois accomplishments that dangerously encouraged mainstream white America to think that the nation’s racial problems “were automatically solved”? How many know that King considered these early victories to have fallen far short of his deeper objective: advancing social, economic, political, and racial justice across the entire nation (including its northern, ghetto-scarred cities) and indeed around the world?
How many Americans know about the King who followed the defeat of open racism in the South by “turning North” in an effort to take the civil rights struggle to a radical new level?
It was one thing, this King told his colleagues, for blacks to win the right to sit at a lunch counter. It was another thing for black and other poor people to get the money to buy a lunch.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/169/169_street_mlk_democratic_socialist.html
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BTW: this “debate” (it’s actually a collection of related clips) begins with Malcolm X tearing into MLK, but it also includes some quality MLK “responses”. In which he explains the difference between determined non-violence and passive non-resistance.
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even though i teach in texas, with all the right wing insanity that implies, when i talk about mlk in my social studies classes i get across to them that his approach of determined non-violence was a revolutionary tool intended to create so much internal conflict within the hearts and minds of the oppressors that they would not be able to continue, that king believed in a fair and equitable distribution of society’s goods, that king fought for the right of working people to form unions and strike and collectively bargain for improved working conditions. i’ve taken a couple of really angry phone calls from parents over what they described as my distortions of martin luther king. i managed to stay respectful but firm each time but they were very fond of their conservative myths.
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