democrats are centrist relative to the left.
When Trump was campaigning for his first presidency everybody was saying he would start a bunch of wars and nuke the whole world. When none of that happened he had to be a traitor since he didn't start any beautiful patriotic wars. Reality is of no consideration to the uneducated and educated masses. War is peace, peace is war.
I will not be mutilated by mortar in a ditch or send my children to die in a trench, no matter who is president. War is a racket, I feel truly sorry for those who suffer and will suffer for following their "leaders".
Find me a quote of someone on the left saying Trump was bad for not starting a war
I am fully aware that most leftist (which means most of HN) think that Trump is an insane war monger, even though he served four years as president without starting any wars. Like I wrote, reality does not matter at all anymore to anyone.
And missiles shot at Syrian air base, where Russian/Syrian planes were luckily moved just in time, very conveniently, almost like it was a good PR stunt.
How is that diplomacy?
lmao
Even really smart and educated people I know are surprised to discover most voters in the US do not have a party affiliation.
We poll the hell out of our populace and ask, "What do you identify as?" That's how we know how people identify.
> In other countries, people pay membership dues to their political parties and get membership cards. Here, we just declare our allegiance to these private organizations on twitter.
Some states in the US have state-level party organizations which you join and receive a card. Not all.
I don't think a pollster would be disappointed that you don't have a party affiliation. In fact some of biggest emphasis in election season is on independents or undecided voters.
Exactly. You can look it up on 538 or wherever you like, but all the polls say roughly the same thing: There's more unaffiliated voters than there is voters for either party. Something like 40-45% unaffiliated, with ~25% identifying as Republican and ~30% identifying as Democrat.
No, I refuse to play that game and I'd rather burn the place to the ground and suffer together than walk willingly to my own execution.
Traditionally the left has been associated with social policies (stemming from socialism/communism vs capitalism)
And there always was a part of the left which was anti-war, and always was a more "totalitarian" version of the left that felt it was morally justified.
But in every society the meaning of left and right has been fluid.
And nowhere in these splits - neither in Democrat/Republican, nor in left/right - is there any notion of actually looking at the problem and trying to find an actual, effective, efficient solution, that maximizes the desired impact and minimizes undesired second-order effects.
The prospect of a (Jeb) Bush vs. (Hillary) Clinton race seemed emblematic of a government that was a democracy in form, but not in practice. And then along came Trump who nicely put everyone I know (myself included) in either pro-Trump or anti-Trump camps.
All forms of change that aren't voting are either de jure or de facto illegal. Sure, you can march... on a route cleared with the authorities... with a permit 90 days in advance... as long as absolutely nothing untoward happens within two blocks.
But there is a very real difference in policy between rural Alabama and Chicago. In no small part because of different parties exercising control in those localities.
I believe this difference exist. But I attribute it mostly to "rural" vs. "urban" part - and for far enough places, also to difference in cultures between the two locations. Rural Alabama has a different lifestyle, different market, different pressing problems than urban Chicago, different individual needs - which may result in people in those two locations overall promoting opposite policies.
How well these differences overlap with with Dem/Rep or left/right belief clusters is, I think, mostly incidental.
The parties, to the degree they do differ, do position themselves on opposite sides of the urban vs rural divide.
We (Americans) live in a representative democracy (for choosing public officials) and that democracy gives a great deal of influence and power to capitalists/industrialists (the "racket"), which has been absolutely successful in establishing and maintaining the existence and wealth of the country.
If you want to argue there is no democracy, find another person to argue with; my premise begins with the US being a representative democracy.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/07/texas-ken-paxton-200...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/11/2000-mule...
I don't think the election was fair, I think it was rigged. And I think it smells so badly that I suspect our elections have been rigged for a long, long time.
Were those videos in context? Were those videos accurately described? Why do all the judges across the country think those claims were a farce? Are they part of the deep state too?
There were no "statistical anomalies" during that election, yet there are a surprising number of people who have never taken a stats class in their life absolutely sure there were.
What did you see with your own eyes. Were you a first hand witness of a ballot box stuffing incident? When and where did it happen? Did you take a video of it with sound?
> video shows people stuffing ballots in boxes all across the country
How do you know when those videos were made? Who recorded those videos? Where was each video taken (which voting district and when)?
> where ballot counting was shut down in four states simultaneously and then restarted
Which four states? What what was the date and time the ballot counting stopped? What was the date and time the ballot counting resumed?
> And there's other weird stuff that I honestly should have been keeping track of.
Like what? Any concrete examples?
> I don't think the election was fair, I think it was rigged.
Yet you're very non-specific about your reasoning and evidence. Typically, people cite sources that support their argument, but you did not.
We can talk about the FiveThirtyEight graphs at some point which show what is, in essence, a statistical anomaly.
The 'Democrats' would have been very popular in the South in the 1950's among people who would now refer to themselves as 'conservative'.
Not that Left/Dem are different things, they are mostly the same, they are constrained by the other side of the aise.
These aren't intellectual positions at all, they're just soap opera stuff. If they've picked up anything about political economy, it was because they were in left-wing spaces during the rise of the Sanders campaign. As far as I can tell, all they took away from it is the slur "tankie," which they think has something to do with Tienanmen Square and should be screamed at anyone anyone to the left of Bill Kristol.
In general, it's obvious that identity politics forms the core of the political class of today's Democratic Party (especially the young), and equally obvious that America is the innovator that other progressive parties follow in this respect. America also has thrown itself into gender politics with particular enthusiasm - gender transitions, even of minors, are a cornerstone of American progressivism today, even as progressive European countries have rolled that back to an extent.
I will concede that Europe leads in the other main aspect of current-day progressivism, the Green movement, although American progressives are avid followers.
And no, j6 were no tourist not peaceful. They were literal violent attempt to prevent votes count.
The FBI has considered right wing extremism a serious threat to the US since before Ruby Ridge and Waco. The turner diaries was written before either.
And the KKK was exactly a militant right wing political group, with members being politicians, sometimes openly.
From ~FDR-LBJ, the democratic party was pretty pro-war (so was the average american, really, so I guess that's fair for a party called democratic), but that really starts to flip in the late 60s/early 70s.
And ended by a Republican
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/286787-gop-questions-obamas-afg...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-guantanamo/ho...
As you noted, Obama and Biden increased troop count before Trump signed the Doha agreement to end the war.
Regardless, who is there when they withdrew is not the same as who made the plan and started the withdrawal. The Doha Agreement was drafted and signed under Trump. Biden didnt renege on the agreement and executed it.
We have no idea if he would have drafted such an agreement but his track record in that regard isnt good. Obama and Biden increased troops as another commenter noted.
Ignoring the whole background of Korea, it's occupation by Japan, and split at the end of WW2, the Korean War began when the North invaded the South.
For Vietnam, the war ended when the North Vietnam 'won' and the South collapsed.
It's not necessarily meaningful to call one party more or less hawkish than the other. It often comes down to the leader, era, and coalition behind them. Bush/Cheney were definitely more aggressive than Gore would have been, but HRC was positioning herself to be much more hawkish than Trump ended up ruling as. That's why in the post-2016 era many infamous hawks like Bill Kristol and David Frum have been Democrat-aligned.
Eisenhower continued and increased support for the French till 1954. Then backed Diem, blocked the 1956 elections, and sent in more "advisers", however .. :)
An OSS Dear Team provided training, medical and logistical assistance to Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh in 1945. An OSS doctor is reported to have treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria and dysentery. [0] Then Truman provided troop transport, money and materiel for France to re-conqueror Indochina (Democrat).
Archimedes Patti, from the OSS wrote a book [1] about the experience.
War is multi-party, forget tech stocks, I gotta invest in Lockheed Martin.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_Deer_Team [1] "Why Vietnam?: Prelude to America's Albatross
Antiwar sentiments existed for many of these, though it's notable that considerable anti-war sentiment in the US against entry into WWII had a distinctly hard-right flavour to it. Not all anti-war sentiment, as there can be many possible motiviations, but in this specific case, domestic groups sympathetic with (and often orchestrated by) rightest European belligerents had an outsized role.
The anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s became associated with Democrats as that party swung leftward and shed its own long-standing Southern affiliations, and grew our of anti-nuclear and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, all of which saw Vietnam specifically as an unjustified and unjust war, with considerable merits to that viewpoint.
Painting pro- or anti-war sentiments as distinctly left or right, or aligned with either of the two present major parties is not historically accurate and misses considerable nuance.
The Vietnam War began under one Democrat, escalated and spread beyond Vietnam under his Democratic successor, and then under a Republican. It was ended by another Republican.
The Persian Gulf War was entirely a Republican affair.
The Bosnian war and the bombing of Serbia were overseen by a Democrat.
The "war on terror" was started by a Republican who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and continued for nearly 8 more years under a Democrat.