P much all the usian leftists I know refer to themselves as leftist…
(Myself included, usually used with a radical qualifier, because I am rad, goddammit!)
Anecdotal Battle Commence!
5 Likes
Technically it can, if both parties are equally balanced to the left and to the right, plus regular changes between them, you can get a reasonable moderate centre-ground setup in the long-run.
But as the USA and the UK show, when it becomes unbalanced it becomes a nightmare: Both countries now regularly feature a ‘choice’ of insane-rightwing / heavy rightwing or vote wasted by the voting system. With what might have been considered rightwing/centre-right decades ago now referred to as ‘extreme-leftwing’ by the media…
Oh how i long for an end to the effective two party state here in the UK, it really is the foundation of our democracy that is completely broken by this here.
2 Likes
Good luck taking on the absurd “equally bad” narrative, people are extremely invested in it to justify their complicity in Trump’s election.
1 Like
Your behavior is shitty behavior. FYI, the person you’re calling out is like as not, not the person who flagged you. (But FWIW it wasn’t me.)
5 Likes
Location doesn’t matter that much in a PRIMARY! What matter is whether your candidate can attract centrists enough to win the general election. Winning is what matters if you want to govern, or at least keep the reactionaries out of power. This is a hateful fact for the left, many of whom would rather keep their purity than vote for a centrist who will only support some of their agenda.
To wander off on a bit of a tangent for a moment, I wouldn’t actually be too sure about that.
One flaw I’ve noticed with the political compass questions is that it conflates Authoritarianism with Social and religious Traditionalism. Now, this catches your Paleoconservatives, your Nazis and your Stalinist Tankies quite well, but there’s a subset that it doesn’t catch- Authoritarians on the left who fundamentally don’t believe in individual rights and would like to impose an anti-traditional, revolutionary Morality using the full force of the State. They’re small in number, sure, and the echo chambers of the internet magnify what little impact they have, but as the last few years have shown, you have to watch out for the crazy fringes, because they can very quickly stop being a joke, and that people are generally very reluctant to criticise crazy when it comes wrapped in the “right” colours of team red or team blue.
Fivethirtyeight has a good article on the Georgia race–
Their take is that there isn’t really much centre ground to go for in Georgia, so the strategy for a Democratic candidate there has to be “Build and register the base, Turn out the base and win over a small number of swing voters”. Which seems to be Abrams’ exact strengths and plan. Your money is probably better spent locally.
5 Likes
Some interesting research on the left/right/centre division:
8 Likes
I don’t know that I agree with that. As something resembling a libertarian socialist, I see plenty of either outright or borderline authoritarian socialists on the left, and I think you’d see more if the left ever got into power. They are less skewed towards authoritarian than the right, though.
2 Likes
This is important:
There are more than two axes of ideology in play here.
The two axes portrayed on my graph upthread were for economic and “social conservatism”, where social conservatism is basically a euphemism for misogyny, homophobia and racism.
The arguments about authoritarianism within the radical left are not about that. Instead, they’re about the role of state power.
A quick political graph for that statism → anarchism axis:
Marxist-Leninists → DemSocs → AnarchoSocialists
…although there is obviously a lot of detail to fill in there. Placing the major parties on that axis runs into problems with contradicting actions and rhetoric; advocating “small government” while maintaining a massive empire, etc. They’re both fond of statism for the peasants and anarchism for the ruling class.
.
The big intraleft fights I see on Twitter are mostly between anarchists and MLs arguing over history. Not a lot of trust between those camps, for solid reasons.
Circumstances demand at least a temporary truce, however.
1 Like
In theory, maybe, but I’ve encountered plenty of authoritarian busybodies who call themselves anarchists.
3 Likes
Arseholes are everywhere.
OTOH, you could also propose a rule-of-law → illegalism axis. Or collectivism → individualism.
There is no “correct” level of detail for ideological analysis. It’s just a choice as to how fine-grained you want to go.
7 Likes
I’ve been for a long time in the opinion that a comparative analysis of political views between the USA and Europe along that particular axis would yield results in contradiction to the usual narratives.
2 Likes
Reminder that the left/liberal split is not new to US politics. It was just suppressed for a while.
5 Likes
“Socialists are all rich white college kids”.
3 Likes
https://twitter.com/reaghanhunt/status/1000361735222644736?s=21
There’s a fire that’s just waiting for fuel
7 Likes
I think we can change some laws to move the capital away from the Capitol.
Our current crop of elected leaders, they can’t even begin to do that without first taking food off their own plates. See that happening with this crew? I don’t, maybe next generations we will achieve Utopia (a word that means ‘great place that isn’t actual’)
I used to be against judging communism by Mao and Stalin. Now I realize that judging communism by Mao and Stalin makes sense, but likewise, capitalism should be judged by the fruits of “crony capitalism” and “regulatory capture”. It was never going to go any other way.
The current state of the US government sure does make a mockery of the idea that people with guns are going to fight against tyranny.
Americans have all kinds of funny words. American “Conservatives” are people who want to choke out or burn down institutions that keep the country together. American “Libertarians” are people who want the government to stop preventing them from oppressing the poor using their wealth. American “Socialists” being people who just want the government to take some fairly reasonable, incremental steps on behalf of the well-being of it’s people makes sense.
I think what we call a “centrist” is a technocrat - a person who believes that society should be run by experts. We* don’t like democracy because the masses are not experts. We want everyone to vote, but they want everyone to be Educated™ enough to vote The Right Way™.
* “We” because I’m a cultural technocrat, even if I’m not an intellectual supporter of the idea.
I wouldn’t go that far, but I do think that we should see the merging of political and economic power as a natural outcome of capitalism that needs to be active restrained. And I think when a society doesn’t restrain it, it eventually gets to a point that it is very hard to undo.
3 Likes
Or, maybe, giving people the choice between a republican and a republican-lite doesn’t excite the democratic voter base, nor does it swipe any support from the republicans.
The democrats need to stop assuming that every time the GOP goes further right, they need to follow in the name of ‘centrism’. Actually try and take control of the Overton Window, don’t just meekly follow where conservatives drag it.
1 Like
The last few decades are usually framed as “the GOP moved right and dragged the Dems with them”.
Personally, I think that this framing may have it backwards. The Dems have been moving right and pushing the GOP ahead of them.
1 Like
Speaking of the study in question, I read that apparently the author basically labeled anyone not identifying as extreme left or extreme right as “centrist”. Which makes the whole thing seem like an excercise in uselessness, especially since it is using self-applied labels instead of asking people for their actual opinions and then trying to place them on a political spectrum or something.
1 Like
