2020 US Election (Part Two)

[aelf]

Yeah, the real extreme centrists are people who label themselves as 'Moderates'. Now those buttholes will insist on civil debate when people are dying outside.

 

[Ironsided]

The deepest weakness in his argument is the "they" at :22. Who's that "they"?

I assume the “they” are the moderate, centrist, liberal establishment. Politicians like Biden, Pelosi and Schumer, old establishment and celebrity actors and pundits, media, pundits and anchors at like CNN, MSNBC like Maddow and Hayes etc. Basically, those feeding into the narrative that “nothing” and “status quo” is good and the only reasonable way that can overcome “that Nazi lot” on the right which they incidentally uphold and feed by that messaging.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The assertion made in the video is that this "they" "want the right to be outright fascist."

Those people you listed do not want the right in America to be outright fascist. No sane person wants that.

There's no "they."

He's imagining some outside agent that "wants" the two parties to be a certain way. The two parties are a certain way, based on what they believe and espouse and work for.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

So let me get this straight, if I feel that unbridled capitalism doesn't work, and unbridled socialism doesn't work, while a balance of the two does work, keeping each other in check, am I centrist, and have no vission?

This is why I feel (in America's case) that a strong Democratic party and a weak Republican party is not the best for the country. These two ideologies need to balance each other out.
If the status to date is one of unbalance, then that means, I do not want to preserve the status quo.

It's a very strange message

 

[Ironsided]

I think the argument made, most clearly at the end, is that the right are not Nazis and at the very worst quite tame neofascists, which is unfortunate but very conveniently possible to be propped up as such Nazi threat to make the offer of “yum nothing” more palatable.

 

[Lexicus]

The assertion made in the video is that this "they" "want the right to be outright fascist."

Those people you listed do not want the right in America to be outright fascist. No sane person wants that.

There's no "they."

He's imagining some outside agent that "wants" the two parties to be a certain way. The two parties are a certain way, based on what they believe and espouse and work for.

This is interesting because it fingers one essential difference between the "moderates" and the "progressives", which is that the former seem pretty much unwilling or unable to analyze society in any systemic way. Treating the behavior of the parties as given is an abdication of analysis. It's typical of the structure-blindness of liberals that drives the left insane. If you really don't think it's possible to understand why the parties "are a certain way" then suddenly the absolute refusal to reckon with certain arguments made by the left (e.g. the argument that Biden represents a return to the status quo that brought us Trump in the first place) makes more sense.

If you are serious about fixing the country you will have to reckon with the fact that, yes, there is a "they," that the Republican Party being fascist and the Democrats being wet napkin fake opposition serves "their" interests very well, and that "they" have engaged in a multi-decade campaign to subvert democracy wherever possible, and to shift the terms of political debates so as to make it seem that "There Is No Alternative" to make what democracy we have less meaningful.

Just to be clear, it is absolutely in the interest of the big capitalists (and, frankly, also of many of the "small business" capitalists we like to pretend aren't capitalists for some reason) for the right in the US to be fascist and the "left" to be Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden.

So let me get this straight, if I feel that unbridled capitalism doesn't work, and unbridled socialism doesn't work, while a balance of the two does work, keeping each other in check, am I centrist, and have no vission?

This is why I feel (in America's case) that a strong Democratic party and a weak Republican party is not the best for the country. These two ideologies need to balance each other out.
If the status to date is one of unbalance, then that means, I do not want to preserve the status quo.

It's a very strange message

Are you really saying that the Democrats represent "unbridled socialism"???
What planet are you living on?

 

[Kyriakos]

Again, when the alternative is



nothing sounds pretty tasty.

As he says, "the only possible appeal of that politics is, 'well, at least they're not Nazis.'" When the alternative is Nazis, that's an appeal--about which your Graeber fellow shouldn't be so glibly dismissive.

And by the way, it's XXXTREEEEEEEME Centrism, thank you very much. At least have the decency to spell our movement's name correctly.

The deepest weakness in his argument is the "they" at :22. Who's that "they"?

The issue here isn't about strategy - though Bernie wouldn't just do nothing. The issue is that Biden doing nothing is just Biden being Biden. What would he do? Open his mouth and let the partly pulped word-salad come out?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Are you really saying that the Democrats represent "unbridled socialism"???
What planet are you living on?

No I'm not. Neither am I saying Republicans represent "unbridled capitalism"

Should you not wait for my answer before you ask which planet I am on? Or did you just go with a "yes"?

Next time give me a chance, ok?

edit: And it's Mars by the way ... obviously

 

[Drakle]

Going everybody but me is blind to reality, and all liberals are like 'this' is a not a manner of arguing that is conducive to actually changing any minds or convincing people to side with you. Trumpeting my view is the one true truth, also falls a bit flat when that so-called truth completely failed to predict the course of the 2018 and 2020 elections, and the 2020 primary campaign underperformed 2016.

"Liberals" gets thrown around like a slur, even worse than how the right normally uses it and seems to basically include 'everybody' that disagrees with me, that isn't in the Republican party. Some of those explicitly named, do support filibuster reform, court expansion and a vast array of reforms to so many topics in American life. Claiming they don't want anything changed is just lying. Biden has a vast set of policy positions. Meanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party literally dispensed with the need for a party platform, and can't outline even the vaguest policy that isn't cultural grievance talking points, or the last gasped talking points of the Heritage Foundation. They still don't have a real plan for healthcare, despite them campaigning against the ACA since 2009. That is over a decade.

Those who don't want change in the Democratic Party are a far narrower group. And they are a problem. But the Left did very to little to actually eject them and preferred to run candidates who hit every slogan for pie in the sky policy, rather than electing people who backed the real institutional change. A socialist was never going to win in the vast majority of contests, so the Coons and their ilk got to keep squatting in the Senate. And they also bungled their shots at flipping seats, in the competitive races where they did win seats.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

They still don't have a real plan for healthcare, despite them campaigning against the ACA since 2009. That is over a decade.

It's the one thing Trump has been upfront about. They have a plan, it's the best plan ever, and it is always going to be released in 2 weeks time

 

[Phrossack]

I think one reason the Left has lost almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred and fifty years or so is because leftism, pretty much by definition, tends to involve siding with the weak against the strong. When your allies are politically feeble and your enemies are immensely powerful, it's difficult, if not impossible, to achieve anything at all. Right-wing extremism always has an easier time of things because it ultimately promises to protect the powerful, which is a message those with power like to hear.

 

[Hrothbern]

I think that using Nazi's all the time in discussions as if it is commonly understood the same way what that concept means is not very fruitful for meaningful and productive dialogue and better understandings.

It would already be an improvement to use the WW2 period with words like National-Socialism (the German variant), National-Catholicism (the Italian variant and the Spanish variant woken up again with the Catalonia issue) and for today's development National-Evangelicalism (the current US variant).

They are all based on extreme nationalism with using some mainstream embedded collectiveness with a legitimising nature to get more support to repress deviating thinking into obedience instead of encouraging plurality, tolerance and dialogue.

 

[EgonSpengler]

So let me get this straight, if I feel that unbridled capitalism doesn't work, and unbridled socialism doesn't work, while a balance of the two does work, keeping each other in check, am I centrist, and have no vission?

This is why I feel (in America's case) that a strong Democratic party and a weak Republican party is not the best for the country. These two ideologies need to balance each other out.
If the status to date is one of unbalance, then that means, I do not want to preserve the status quo.

It's a very strange message

I agree with you, but the problem we face right now is that the Republican Party represents and champions some things that cannot be accommodated. There's no balancing White Nationalism and Christian fundamentalism with a republican democracy that values justice and liberty. Personally, I've abandoned the notion that the Republican Party is the Conservative Party, just as I've abandoned the idea that the Democratic Party is the Progressive Party, and I encourage other people to do the same whenever I can. Just yesterday, I gave one of Max Boot's op-eds to a colleague who had explained their (probable, they hadn't decided yet) vote for Trump by saying "I'm a conservative." Americans need to abandon the idea that the spectrum "conservative-moderate-progressive/liberal" maps onto the spectrum "Republican-Independent-Democrat."

 

[Kyriakos]

I think one reason the Left has lost almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred and fifty years or so is because leftism, pretty much by definition, tends to involve siding with the weak against the strong. When your allies are politically feeble and your enemies are immensely powerful, it's difficult, if not impossible, to achieve anything at all. Right-wing extremism always has an easier time of things because it ultimately promises to protect the powerful, which is a message those with power like to hear.

It also doesn't have it's own party. When your party has anything up to people who can spend 250 million dollars just to make sure Bernie is defeated (remember also his threat to run as independent if Bernie won the nomination in 2016), you aren't a left part in any sense.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

I think one reason the Left has lost almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred and fifty years or so is because leftism, pretty much by definition, tends to involve siding with the weak against the strong. When your allies are politically feeble and your enemies are immensely powerful, it's difficult, if not impossible, to achieve anything at all. Right-wing extremism always has an easier time of things because it ultimately promises to protect the powerful, which is a message those with power like to hear.

Eh idk, I think how we define leftism probably renders it incapable of being considered as winning anything. But in Europe, DemSoc policy has been relatively standard orthodoxy in various regards for decades now. It's easy to forget there used to be a time when tons of children would just spend their lives working all day long in a factory hoping that a fire didn't kill them, while their grandparents basically just became poor and died like all old people. And also one of their grandparents couldn't vote.

Now, has the left failed to make much of a dent against capitalism? Yeah sure. But it's also the global orthodoxy in terms of economic policy. It ain't gonna change over night.

 

[Zkribbler]

I think one reason the Left has lost almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred and fifty years or so is because ...

You must have slept through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Rights Act, the women's movement, the Vietnam War protests, Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, the New Deal, school desegregation, Obamacare, Title IX, Medicare, etc.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

A GOP strategist who has been consulting with Senate campaigns said Republicans have been carefully laying the groundwork to restrain a Biden administration on federal spending and the budget deficit by talking up concerns about the price tag for another round of virus relief. The thinking, the strategist said, is that it would be very hard politically to agree on spending trillions more now and then in January suddenly embrace fiscal restraint.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...enate-republicans-slipping-with-stimulus-ploy

It's happening!!!!!!

 

[EgonSpengler]

I think one reason the Left has lost almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred and fifty years or so is because leftism, pretty much by definition, tends to involve siding with the weak against the strong. When your allies are politically feeble and your enemies are immensely powerful, it's difficult, if not impossible, to achieve anything at all. Right-wing extremism always has an easier time of things because it ultimately promises to protect the powerful, which is a message those with power like to hear.

I see what you're getting at, but poverty-stricken towns in Appalachia with more drugs than jobs and farmers who have to cull livestock because they can't afford to feed them aren't the powerful, unless you broaden the definition of powerful to include "those who used to be doing okay, but aren't anymore." The right-wing message appeals to people who look around and say, "Gee, our lives used to be pretty good and now everything sucks. WTH happened?" I think it was similar in 1920s Germany. The National Socialists started out as the German Workers Party (or something like that, I forget the exact name) and part of Hitler's early pitch was that the German working class had been screwed by the ruling class. How do you say "Drain the Swamp" in German? It's then that they bring out the scape-goating and the bending of the truth.

 

[Drakle]

You, people, do know that the vast majority of people are fine with capitalism because it has worked and socialism/communism has not worked despite being tried numerous times. And don't say 'well what about Europe/Nordics'. They are capitalist. Just campaign on a non-toxic label. An average voter is a middle-aged person who has it drilled in their head that socialism is bad, not an edgy person online. Winning elections requires the former people, not the latter.

Global capitalism is not in a good state. But the basic fundamentals of a market system have led to the greatest sustained growth in human history, and has lifted billions from extreme poverty. The issue is making sure governments continue to reinvest in the system, break up market distortions and keep innovating and solving problemsms. Not try either an untested or failed system, which the people who want capitalism to keep degrading will use as a lever to stay in power and keep breaking things.

 

[Hrothbern]

I think one reason the Left has lost almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred and fifty years or so is because leftism, pretty much by definition, tends to involve siding with the weak against the strong.

To make that even worse
Left is also seen as the party for losers. This social Darwinism view is eroding the traditional more social cohesive conviction that the strong shoulders should care for the weak.
And many people who struggled upward in socio-economic terms during their life want to give expression to their feeling that they are a winner by not voting on a losers party.
And many people still and likely forever in a weak position cherish the feeling to belong to the winners by voting on them and talking like one of them.

The Left also seldom inspires ordinary people to gain succes in their personal life. The Left is mainly occupied with non-personal systemic and theorethical discussions ordinary people have no time for to follow or understand.
And the language used by The Left is not really the common language of Joe Average, it's too academic and has too many difficult words with many syllables in long sentences.
Language and Culture are very strong connected.
The language of The Left is an almost immediate disconnect with Joe Average.

The Left is fundamentally in limbo because they are supported by the more social well educated and want to care for the traditional weak who are not well educated.