Weighted by population, and including the places where that attitude has been taken to it's logical extreme by the dominant faction actually suppressing it's opposition, it absolutely is how politics works in the rest of the world.
It's not how politics works in healthy, multiparty democracies, but those are, globally, rather more the exception than the rule.
OhBoyHereWeGo.jpg
It's stupid to try and condense the political ideology of the US (or almost any nation) down to one spectrum and then try and map that onto the rest of the world when we (and the rest of the world) have a lot of ideology based on "well party X took position Y because party V had position W back in year Z and they needed to be opposite and it stuck around". What's left and right is mostly a figment of historical coincidence, not any sort of ideological consistency across a party.
Shall we do a survey of immigration and gun control policies across Europe to drive the point home? If you don't like that option we can survey the social safety nets and freedom of expression in Asia.
That's not ideology: that's literally not at all what "ideology" means. What you're describing is dogma, and the fact that the two are often conflated in public perception speaks to the OP's point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJFC1qFCgyA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTm5rp8r6fE&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOtGr1JFCnE&feature=emb_imp_...
Or do you mean the sympathetic and nice personality he showed in public?
No one is a role model.
Maybe a firefighters or a teacher or a policeman should be looked at as a hero before a politician.
Humans are flawed - we can't escape that. Every human has a dark side but, it seems, some humans have a very large one.
What does that even mean ?
Any one with half a brain will find good ideas from the far left to the far right. This "left vs right" is the dumbest thing we ever came up with. Vote and fight for ideas, not sport teams... keep the fanatism for football
But we live in an age of political parties. It seems we can't do representative democracy without them, for better or worse: And given that, we need a language to talk about parties' politics in broad terms. And then we inevitably come up with various axes such as left/right, authoritarian/liberal, and so forth to describe them. So long as we remember that these are rough categories, I think it is useful and harmless. But of course, once fronts harden and the tribal impulse sets in, that important caveat may be the first to go out the window.
this is the claim, what is your supporting reasoning?
>we need a language to talk about parties' politics in broad terms
Why? Why should we strive to generalize something so inherently complex and impactful as policy.
>once fronts harden and the tribal impulse sets in
I'm not understanding how simplistic labels can contribute to anything other than this outcome.
The more dimensions there are, the more you need to make allies to reach that bar. Nobody exactly agrees with you on all things. In order to get them to vote for your things, you need to agree to vote for their things. There's no other way to achieve it.
Policy is complex and impactful, but in the end a decision gets made. The goal is to make a decision that most people can live with. That's the best you can hope for. And you achieve that by assembling a group who support each other. That group is a real thing, regardless of the label you put on it. You're either part of that group or you're not, and you have to live with the outcome.
Because we (most of us, myself included) don't have the capacity to reason about the entire complex mess at once. To some extent, all thinking about the real world must be simpler than reality. This is true even of mathematical models of physical reality, even more so of mental models of politics. Yes, we should strive to improve our understanding, and I struggle with this daily, but if you remove all broad categories from consideration, leaving only the details, I for one will be lost. The usual metaphor is something about forests and trees, I believe.
But if we were to apply labels to UBI, I imagine that the left would mostly be in favour, and the right would mostly be against it. Ideally, everyone should consider the notion on its merits. It's just that what way you're leaning, will inevitably influence your thinking to some extent.
Edited to add: To be more concrete, consider two possible effects of UBI: (1) Raising the quality of life of poor people, and (2) Discouraging people from seeking work. I imagine that a right-wing thinker will weigh (2) more heavily than (1), while a left-wing thinker will do the opposite. Each may even say that the other outcome is not even going to happen, or only negligibly so.
To any thinking person the left-vs-right paradigm is beyond stupid, but yet, it keeps persisting, even worldwide.
Actually, the parties are themselves to blame, as wrong-thinkers gets weeded out or re-educated.
Leftism and rightism are little more than broad, inchoate moral intuitions that are ultimately given concrete form and specific content by ideologies, philosophy and realpolitik.
For example, economic class-driven socialism and wokeness will conflict with each other but both are driven by a thought pattern that's descended from Marxism. Gendercrit feminists and the woke, same thing, but both more or less want to strangle each other.
On the right, you get can have Nietzsche-influenced hyperindividualist überman strivers and a kind of communitarian neo-trad thinking. Both clearly rightist, both in tension with each other. The GOP and the aforementioned localist Christian tradheads are definitely against each other, but not leftists.
List goes on. I'd consider the woke ideology genuinely leftist, it's just not very genuinely pro the little guy, pro the working man. Many traditional Marxists are certainly tearing their hair out from what I've read some.
Democrats tend to be authoritarian and pro-centralization of power.
Republicans tend to be anti-authoritarian and pro-decentralization.
Both major parties have a long history of deep corruption. They've essentially colluded to rob the American people blind. Unfortunately, until these two corrupt institutions get together and decide to eliminate parties from our political process, the American people will have to use the threat of supporting the opposite party to get them to stay even mildly in their lane.
EDIT - The voting swings on this comment are interesting.
Take centralization. You see that the Republicans are pro-decentralization. Except they're the party that's trying to delete California's air quality rules in favor of federalized ones. And also delete state net neutrality rules in favor of (lack of) federal ones. Drill down to the state level, and it's clear that their policy on centralization versus decentralization is actually about "the rules should be decided on whatever level we hold power." In states where there is a Republican lock on state government, any Democratic city that dares to pass progressive legislation will not infrequently be met with a state law restricting their ability to pass that legislation. A few states passed laws prohibiting localities from enacting mask mandates. The "bathroom bills" are another example of this effect.
On the levels that I am most knowledgeable about, the trend is roughly true. For example, Dems are the party of gun control while simultaneously militarizing police (a bipartisan effort). The moves to licensing and excessive taxation for what should be fundamental rights (e.g licenses to operate businesses, high taxes on your primary residence) is another trend that concerns me, but quickly goes out of the scope of what can be readily discussed on a forum.
My view is that both parties seek power on whatever levels they can get it. That's why I am for the abolition of political parties altogether, and a move towards a more direct democracy (public veto).
Implementation probably matters more than the model. That said, I still prefer certain models because it aligns better with my personal principles.
1. Options in representation. California is essentially a single-party state. Switzerland has substantially more options in this regard.
2. California is freaking huge, Switzerland is not. Because of this, you have dramatically different interests between different regions in California contrasted with more homogeneous needs in Switzerland.
3. The population of Switzerland is not nearly as diverse as California. They speak several languages there, but overall you have a group of people with very similar cultural and historical values.
4. This point would require a small novel, but in essence California abuses the system to go around the process rather than go through it. You could describe this as the contrast between cooperative governance (Switzerland) and adversarial governance (California).
In short, if we stuck with George Washington's suggestion to lower the maximum size of congressional districts to one representative per 30,000 people, California might be in better shape. It probably would have also been beneficial to listen to Alexander Hamilton when he called parties “the most fatal disease.”
For points 1 and 4, those sound like symptoms to a more rudimentary problem. I don't know what that problem is, but my guess is its something systemic and structural.
Points 2&3 are could also be solved by dividing the state up so that each region could self-govern. Given that this is unlikely, I have a hard time imagining a solution. It's extremely hard to make "city folk" understand what's going on in rural areas, and vice versa. Worse, our current political climate is such that demonizing the other group is seen as a morally acceptable thing to do, almost always without really understanding them in the first place.
The first step to solving these problems in California is to close the political divide and get the people to work together to establish better representation.
Eliminating unions and splitting the state don’t seem to be feasible options. What else can we do, is there something less radical that can chip away to close this gap?
Perhaps evidence to the contrary, it seems widely believed that the governance of most Nordic countries and other nations like Switzerland result in (much?) better outcomes than the US. There seems to be something of a fascination with those nations in terms of their social support systems and the like. Interestingly, those nations are substantially more homogeneous the United States.
> Splitting the state up would draw territory lines where there are only cultural lines currently.
I don't think it's a given that this is a bad thing. The principle behind states and counties is that the populations can govern themselves in a way that fits their values. An extreme case, an Amish population that has gathered in a particular region, would probably not feel great about being forcibly assimilated into another group's social or governmental structures. Their beliefs are so disparate that it's difficult to imagine they would be able to find common ground.
> What else can we do, is there something less radical that can chip away to close this gap?
Acceptance of other people's values without demonization is key. The US has devolved into a state where the opposing political belief is now seen as a flaw of their character or morality. You see that Even on a site like this where the average commenter is better educated than the average citizen. (The comments about Trump supporters all supporting segregation as example).
To fix this, we need to break the echo chambers that perpetuate these beliefs. Unfortunately, because of the current polarization, it's difficult even for an elected official to agree with the opposition about any issue without reprisal from their own party or the voters.
"They're fighters. When are we going to get a real fighter on our side to finally stand up to them?"
"Look, I understand being principled, but get real. They don't give a damn about principles and will break every rule to get their way. It's time to fight dirty like they do."
"Our side isn't perfect but they're authoritarians."
BOTH sides say all of these things. And they seem to think it's a joke when the other side claims to see it the same way.
How would you describe a militia that distrust the authority of the government?
Is that antiauthoritarian?
Bolsheviks in Czarist Russia weren't anti-authoritarians, they were just preferred a different authority than was established.
No, libertarianism/minarchism/anarchism are real belief systems.
> If you prefer your own authority, does that make you an authoritarian?
If you prefer your authority be imposed on others, yes; dictators are very much authoritarians.
A strange charge of the "limited-government" party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_the_Rep...
>...your ideology extends from rules concerning which water fountain you can drink from...
The ex-Confederate, Democrat, southern states had segregated water fountains. On the other hand, here's Wikipedia's explanation of where Republican ideology originated:
>The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act,[11] which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The party supported economic reform and classical liberalism while opposing the expansion of slavery.[12][13] Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, slavery was banned in the United States in 1865.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_State...
Yup, they did. Which is why they, in large part, bolted from the Democrats twice over the Democrats supporting progress on civil rights, once temporarily (as the Dixiecrats) because of the nature of US electoral politics converging on a two-party system and them not being strong enough alone to displace a major party, and then permanently when the GOP decided to leverage their post-1968 disillusionment and appeal directly to their racist urges, resulting in a partisan realignment over the subsequent several decades. There's a reason symbols of the Confederacy are seen at Republican rallies these days and not generally Democratic ones.
However, he has done a few things that I have sincere appreciation for. Primarily, we made significant gains towards peace in the middle east by negotiating treaties in the region. Another point in the win column (leading up the covid) was the economy. And the last major thing I cared about was reducing the US dependence on Chinese goods and labor (which are made so affordable due to inhumane practices).
Regarding authoritarianism, he has a mixed track record. He had a thing for executive orders, but he also let the states largely handle the civil unrest and covid in the manner they saw fit.
With that having been said, Trump was a Democrat for a long time, and was certainly not a typical political establishment individual. I find it difficult to attribute him to either party.
"The Internet" was all in A Tizzy because the treaty spelled out some legal procedures (that withdrawing from the treaty would end), and forgot that it was aimed squarely at China.
Bernie Sanders Sep 14, 2016 Our free trade agreements have been a disaster. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is more of the same, but even worse.
I strongly agree. His rhetoric was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issues with Trump as president overall. On that point, he failed miserably.
When your mental model is persistently at odds with the way things work out in reality, you need to reexamine your mental model.
Trump thinks he’s a Republican. A large majority of Republicans enthusiastically agree. I don’t know what you mean by “attribute” but however he got there, Trump is very definitely a Republican.
It might help to recognize that a political party in the US is not one thing. They are a shifting coalition of groups and individuals who have found a way to work together, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not, sometimes for the long term and sometimes not. The policies shift and people change continuously as each tries to get and keep power.
> Trump thinks he’s a Republican.
His own statements, both during and prior to his time as president, strongly suggest otherwise.
> When your mental model is persistently at odds with the way things work out in reality, you need to reexamine your mental model.
You're absolutely right.
Trump thinks its useful to be seen as a Republican, just as he formerly saw it advantageous to be seen as a Democrat and for a brief time (his first Presidential campaign, coincidentally also the first where the Reform Party nomination would have let him funnel federal matching funds as well as donor funds into his own businesses) as part of the Reform Party.
If you look at actual policy Bernie, AOC, Warren, etc push (i.e. not the twitter crap they pile on to for virtue points) much less authoritarians stuff despite being "further" left because they all cut their teeth serving the interests of different demographics.
"Green New Deal" harks back to a time when our government was literally being run by a single man.
>The president stayed in charge of his administration...by drawing fully on his formal and informal powers as Chief Executive; by raising goals, creating momentum, inspiring a personal loyalty, getting the best out of people...by deliberately fostering among his aides a sense of competition and a clash of wills that led to disarray, heartbreak, and anger but also set off pulses of executive energy and sparks of creativity...by handing out one job to several men and several jobs to one man, thus strengthening his own position as a court of appeals, as a depository of information, and as a tool of co-ordination; by ignoring or bypassing collective decision-making agencies, such as the Cabinet...and always by persuading, flattering, juggling, improvising, reshuffling, harmonizing, conciliating, manipulating.[149]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Presiden...
I can't imagine a time that this would have been true in my life.
Dems are pro-regulation, but I don't see that as authoritarian. Republicans want capitalism to determine who has power, rather than democracy.
They both want to socialize corporate losses for billionaires, but Democrats are at least nominally comfortable making them pay taxes.
Between radicalised parties it looks like that everywhere. When people have only two choices, by necessity each choice contains radicalised fringe elements. For some reason societal factors in the US give these elements a huge presence, which I don't really understand.
"See , we told you the other side was crazy"
911 truthers & marxists have always existed, however its only when the "mainstream" of the other side chose to hand the fringe a megaphone, that they came to the fore.
This was not done for debate or charity. It was to score cheap political points in the age of clickbait. Extra Bonus: they got to extrapolate the extreme over 50% of the US population, and by consequence, to expand their potential eyeball audience
And the reason it's blowing up now is because the media monopoly is over. Back when "the media" was ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, UPI, and then-centrist New York Times and Washington Post, nobody was giving the crazies the microphone, on either side. But when Fox and talk radio came on the right, and CNN on the left (and many of the former-center media moved left), then there were people with a slant, and therefore with a motivation to make the other side look silly.
But these people (on both sides) need to reconsider what they're doing. They're making the other side look silly to the mainstream, but they're also helping the fringe of the other side recruit. That may not be a very wise policy...
A lot of the debate around Brexit in the UK worked exactly that way - on both sides.
Many high profile Remainers claimed Leavers were/are racist, ignorant, far-right, small minded, hated all foreigners, didn't know what they were voting for, were old and thus should have their vote be ignored, and worse.
Leavers claimed Remainers were ... what? Afraid of independence? That's about the worst of it from what I can remember. There was not by any stretch of the imagination the same kind of smear campaign alleging terrible motives and terrible souls.
And now this. Parler and Gab within a few months of each other. It's not left wing outlets getting hacked and dumped, is it? I'm afraid there's no equivalency here: whether it's the USA or UK, it's always the same: it's always the left attacking the right. They do not view opposition of any sort as legitimate any more and are determined to destroy conservatism by any means possible, both legal and illegal. Nothing like it exists in reverse.
Leavers calling Remainers "traitors" seems fairly common.
The reaction to the vote however, has been borderline sabotage and very nasty characterizations. This is a symptom of EU being an "all or nothing" entity, of high prestige and privilege. The result being an unmitigated mess on all levels, but do represent legitimate concerns over how EU is run vs local level.
There are many good decisions in EU too addressing broader concerns. So it's a highly complex issue which is hard to solve by a simple vote and by political processes. Yet, that's how they did it this time.
The left (in particular the lefter parties) accuse the right to be racists, islamophobes, antisemites, sexists, at the heel of the bourgeoisie & capitalists, hostile to the working class, and guilty of ecological inaction.
The right (not just the far right, even centre-right like the current party in power) accuses the left to be at the heel of muslims ("islamo-leftist" is thrown around a lot), traitors/threats to their own national identity/culture, weak, slowing down progress, utopists. I might be missing some, I'm biased.
The left's attacks are more personal, more violent. I have an overly-simplified theory of why that is, the left's values are much more centered around the human, and the right's values are much more centered around the economy. That means that everything for the left is personal, it's cutting deep, violation of these values trigger empathy: sadness, anger, feelings of injustice and outrage. Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.
Of course, being biased I also think that the left's argument are more violent because they're _more true_, the right mostly getting its way. We do live in a liberal world which is very right-wing (despite americans liberal being called "leftists", that always confused me, or even "communists" when communism is so radically opposed to the neoliberalism we have today)
For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves.
Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep.
On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created.
> Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.
I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet.
Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of?
It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal.
Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway.
This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith.
Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground.
The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.
> Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it
The idea that "liberalism is about more liberty" (or something we often hear in France "the left values equality more, the right values liberty more") is something is disagree with _so much_. Liberalism is about laissez-faire, jungle law, survival of the fittest. That means the powerful/rich are very free, the less-powerful are free within the bounds set by the powerful: they have to work long hours in stupid jobs and their whole society (laws, means of consumption, social benefits) is set by the powerful. In effect, almost nobody is free to do what they want, only to do what they manage to get resources for (which is often not much). Being a "wage slave" is just one aspect of it.
You're talking about the French Revolution, which is an _excellent_ example of an uprising of the working class that's been subverted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie set the foundation of liberalism on the back of the people's uprise and continues to reap the benefits, the ideals of the revolutionaries most definitely were not aligned with liberalism. We see this again in the second French Revolution, then with the National Council of the Resistance whose ideals and achievements have been deconstructed by decades of liberalist policies.
> Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing
I think it's probably the argument that non-conservative struggle the most to argue against, because it's something that's simply not important to them. They just wave it away, because having their locality remain like it is is not particularly important to them. It's not _not_ important, but it's very secondary to making sure that the people's condition (both in this locality and outside of it), ie their rights/freedom/outcomes/wellbeing, is as good as it can be. I personally find it hard to think that one can morally think otherwise, but moral is a very personal thing.
And _in addition_ to having different values on what's important (human's condition versus the locality staying the same), I also believe that more than enough diversity is created, and we need more diffusion of it rather than less. I think the biggest threat to diversity is not people moving across borders, it is global corporations flooding local markets (Americanism is an obvious example, Chinese manufacture flooding Africa is another).
> Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
I abhor the very notion that because something is "natural", it is a good thing for society. Especially when we're in the realm of metaphors and analogies.
Spain is indeed closer to the US in some ways as the legacy of Franco is very hard to forget by both sides, which causes all manner of weird things
Does anyone have a good global breakdown of political ideology?
What we call the west (North America, Europe, Australia, etc) is about 20% of the global population. These are the sources I usually see. I’m curious about this stuff globally
Removing a defining characteristic to force data to fit your model surely isn't good science
I’d guess that by looking at the wide spectrum of governance with an inclusive view of Western democracies, you could come to the conclusion that economically-liberal powers share much in common.
On the other hand, when commentators make these comparisons they’re generally comparing a handful of exemplar Northern European democratic-socialist governments on a subset of hot-button issues (racial and economic justice, foreign policy, economic regulation, etc.) because that’s where the political action is.
On the contrary, a strengthening of this very pattern can be observed everywhere.
That these look like the politics everywhere should scare the hell out of all of us.
Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support. This does not alter the autonomy of such distinctions. Consequently, the reverse is also true: the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word. Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses."
—Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. [emphasis mine]
But you might be partly right. One of the reasons for that are rules of political marketing (rarely politicians have enough courage to ignore them). One of those rules says that you need to differ and polarization is good. You want to win? Show how different you are.
Another rule is that people don't vote with their brains but with emotions. So stirring emotions is needed. Humiliating your opponent is a good recipe for high emotions.
Social platforms are magnifying differences, emotions, so there is no much more left.
As a result democracy is not in the greatest shape now, some would even argue that it resembles more democracy of Roman Empire from triumvirate times (it was only a facade for the mob that was manipulated by those with power) than system that John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville had in their minds.
It's not a centrist policy at all - the parties (I think there are two, one of which is probably the Libertarian party) that don't support it here don't hold _any_ elected seats on any level. Not even a single city council seat in a backwater town in the middle of nowhere.
So yeah, this is the norm. I'm not saying this to argue, I'm saying it to reinforce you (hopefully that's obvious) :-)
"Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death."
The left will tell you the mainstream Democratic party is working to minimize the impact of the left wing, and succeeding (see recent failures to enact progressive policy on minimum wage and immigration.)
Branding everything as nazism does not help.
It is not a good thing if people go around thinking that their friendly republican neighbor or grandmother/grandfather is a nazi. It might lead some (who doesn't know better) to think nazism isn't that bad.
Besides, Nazism is a particular brand of evil and you fight them better if you learn the correct terminology, so it is a win-win (unless ones goal is to make the divide in American politics even wider by branding those at the other sites as the ugliest of all men.)
Also I haven't seen a single swastika or other NSDAP related flag on any republican event. Do you mean the confederate flag or something?
And we've also just proven my point together as well: so many people have been calling ordinary people nazis that when someone actually bring nazi symbols and colours to the convention I refuse to believe it. (And yes, I will check more sources before I claim this happened.)
Edit: read and reread the link. I couldn't find anything to connect the Republican party and all those flags? I specifically searched for "convention", "party" and "stage" based on your comments but I saw nothing relevant.
Now English is not my first language but are you sure you gave me the correct link, and if so, can you point me to the smoking gun?
And there are lots of other data points to go with it. The singer of the national anthem on that stage, for instance, disagrees that Disney no longer sells "Song of the South", an explicitly racist film from their archives.
These things all work together to paint a clear picture.
There was no fucking nazi symbol on the stage at cpac.
If you want to take a tiny group of extremists that are not accepted by a group and pretend they represent a group, we can do that the other way also.
Nobody at CPAC made up a stage out of a nazi symbol. Some people made up a narrative to fit a false conclusion they created and produced in the media.
Why make the assumption that someone is looking for bullshit when this connection exists?
It's very important to put the burden of proof on the political party that has actual Nazis in it, not on people pointing to what's a very strong coincidence.
That's the fact of thing.
If you want to talk about imagery, let's talk about the Bolshevik imagery incorporated purposely into the groups who ran the recent "summer of love" who were pandered to and supported by people like the current sitting Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.
Donald Trump never supported any nazis or supremacists. The Republican Party has never supported nazis or supremacists. In fact it was the Republican Party that killed the KKK and the Republican Party that won the civil war and ended slavery. The Republican Party didn't have a KKK Grand Wizard in the Senate until ten years ago, and didn't run two of his protegés for president.
So...
Go on making up stories about runes nobody has ever heard of. It sounds like desperation to shift blame for your own beliefs onto other people.
the only people who could see a nazi rune in that stage are people who made up their minds that the people who created it must be nazis in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The rest of us over here in sane world don't evaluate obscure nazi symbols nobody has ever heard of for how we can include them in stage layouts.
And that's the last I'm going to engage with you on this absurdity.
I'm sorry that you have a political axe to grind, but you're not doing yourself any good by pretending things.
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/cpac-nazi-rune-stage-l...
Is it still a nazi symbol if a leftist company created it? Or should we apply logic and not call them nazis either?
...and Gmail, Facebook and Chrome logos are masonic symbols.
You've somehow managed to delegitimize Wikipedia with those stupid claims, congratulations.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/12/flags-and-oth...
We are quickly approaching "have you stopped beating your wife" at this point.
I don't think it would change anything if they came out and said it wasn't intentional.
Some friends of me got viciously attacked last year over some perceived fraud. They responded by publishing their books sinve they had nothing to hide.
What happened? Story just changed: "They are so crooked they managed to hide it from both the police[0] and a big four accounting company." was tje new story.
[0]: who investigated them for three years, first secretly, then openly after a previous false accusation.
Okay, so what? Should I start adding all the random incidents where people made something that was coincidentally shaped like swastika to the Wikipedia article as examples of modern usage?
> CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally.
They did, they called it slanderous.
> slander (noun) - the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation
CPAC cancelled some black dude for anti-semitism. They didn't do that after he was saying anti-Christian and anti-white stuff, only after he started saying that Judaism is illegitimate or whatever. But yes, I'm supposed to believe that they're using Nazi imagery on purpose.
This is exactly how dog whistles work, dude...
I haven't seen anyone picking up that "dog whistle" besides people like you.
edit: search on twitter the phrase "cpac rune based" or "cpac stage based". If it was a dog whistle, I would expect someone to pick up on it and call it "based". Yet the only people who are talking about it are the people who are making those stupid accusations. Literally no one cared about it until you made a big deal out of it. And still barely anyone cares.
Please kill all of my snarky comments in this thread with downvotes, as they were inappropriate and it's a flamewar that has no place on HN.
Because people on that stage, even, openly agree with the things the Charlottesville people marched about.
That's not true: they denied it almost immediately. Like QAnon, it's a hard question on whether to even acknowledge these kinds of conspiracies[0], since denying them can even help to spread them.
The Trump wing is without question populist, nativist, often conspiratorial, and caught in a cult of personality. But they're not Nazis, and by trying to conflate these things, you do a disservice to the victims of actual Nazism (note the publication I linked to, from a country of founded by Nazi survivors that has quite a few supporters of Trump).
Charlottesville Nazis likely did use it, but they're far from being Trump supporters. They deeply distrust him because of Jared and Ivanka. And they're a tiny, tiny percentage of our population - all extreme right-wing groups combined (neoconfederates, Nazis, militia, etc) are well under 1%. You'll see SPLC trumpet things like "30% rise!" without mentioning how tiny these groups are (and they have a good idea about how small they are, it's just harder to fundraise when you discuss these things).
0. https://www.timesofisrael.com/cpac-denies-stage-was-intentio...
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ele...
Many also believe that patriotic violence is acceptable to protect the legitimacy of democracy. What kind of conversation do you have when people believe their democracy was stolen from them?
There is no way at this point for the GOP to safely retreat from the position that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. To do so would be political death.
Same kind we had after Trump was elected. Your account is from before 2016 so I guess you remember those threads.
Seriously nasty they were, but in between all the reflexive downvoting some good answers existed.
Let's try to do better this time around.
PS: I dislike both parties. I just dislike hate and division even more, and I mostly don't dislike individual republicans or democrats.
Democrats made similar claims about at least the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections.
Trump's claims about election fraud and the sheer number of lawsuits are an escalation but it isn't a difference in kind.
Edited to add the following.
The child post correctly points out that I should have mentioned Trump's inciting a violent attempt to overthrow the government. This wasn't a deliberate omission.
On the left I see claims of disenfranchisement done through legal means, which whether you agree with or not is at least something real and concrete.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...) has a pretty good summary of the issues. The voting machine claims were a big deal at the time; I remember a lot of news coverage about that the voting machine companies were owned by Republicans.
I think the 2016 fraud claims were about Russian hacking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...). (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2018/09/11/many-democrats-...) claims that many Democrats questioned the 2016 election.
> On the left I see claims of disenfranchisement done through legal means, which whether you agree with or not is at least something real and concrete.
I agree that disenfranchisement is an issue and am in favor of federal voting standards and protecting the voting rights of convicted felons.
I haven’t seen anyone claiming Russian hacking changed the vote tallies of 2016. I remember the hacking “questions” being quite clear that the results of the election were not in question.
A conversation with my friends on the left about how important gun ownership is when the right is armed to the teeth, and last summer showed the police won’t protect the left from right-wing violence. We have to do it ourselves, which means acquiring firearms and training with them.
The US is headed towards a civil war. Pretty sure it’s unavoidable at this point, though it’ll take some years to play out. Biden pushing strong gun control could be enough to do it.
Calling democrats center right by worldwide standards is a bit of a stretch.
If you are comparing to worldwide, please remember a large majority of the world are still socially far right by American standards, take women’s rights and gay marriage for example.
If you are comparing to the West, democrats are far more left wing than much of Europe’s parties (apart from maybe Sweden), most social justice movements originate from the states and these are in-line with the democrats policies.
Actually, it is. It's just in places that you probably don't want to live in:
> Donald Trump’s Republican party has become more illiberal and retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years, a study has found, with its rhetoric shifting closer that of authoritarian parties ruling in Turkey, Hungary, Poland and India.
> The research by Sweden-based V-Dem Institute highlights what it calls a “global trend” where “the median governing party in democracies has become more illiberal in recent decades”.
* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
* PDF: https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/b6/55/b6553f85-5c5d...
By 2014 it was the GOP that had become more-right and the median with the Democrats hadn't change much from preceding decades:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...
However since then it appears that Democrats have become more-left.
It's mostly raw pathetic populism, incited as much by the press as any other group.
As far as political orientation goes, by worldwide standards America actually ranges from center-right (Democrats) to far-right (Republicans), but there are many confounding factors due to their society being forced into the mold of one-of-two parties. Indeed, the choice of ideologies and political tactics are downright bizarre, even contradictory to the outside norm of left and right when viewed by a foreigner.
What always surprises me is the rabidity of the comments left on sites such as these (both left and right oriented). Although you belong to different tribes, your words are remarkably similar: It seems that you really do see the other party as made up of terrible people, misguided at best, inhuman monsters at worst, unfeeling and callous, perhaps even extermination-worthy in some extreme cases. This is not how politics work in the rest of the world.