Has the Democrat Party gone more left wing/liberal the last 20 yrs?

[Falsedawn]

Can you explain the difference between the right and the left? What is the variable that separates them?

Economics.

Social values are all well and good, but even the farthest left social views are undercut if you allow social heirarchies based on wealth. It's the antithesis of egalitarianism and social cooperation, which are firmly left wing economic views. A true left wing party would advocate for labor unions, social cooperation in the workplace, investment in the economy via wealth redistribution and progressive tax rates, and in extreme cases, destruction of capitalist entities that don't stand up to the egalitarian social goal. Democrats are free market capitalists who eschew a social market economy and industrial democracy in favor of free trade and Corporatism. That places them firmly right wing with regard to economics, their social views temper that to a center-right party overall.

 

[Gandhi]

No. Clinton and the Third Way Democrats moved it right. Obama held that trend. They're a center-right party that just so happens to be a catch all party for anything left wing by virtue of being less right than the alternative.

I came to say this.

After the tea party and then trump how can anyone not see that it is the right that has moved.

 

[mrbaapt]

Obama gave more money to Israel than all previous presidents combined. He also deported more people than any other president. He allowed insurance companies to write their own laws regarding the Affordable Care act.

His policies resembled nothing progressive. A corporatist centrist at best.

 

[Falsedawn]

@Falsedawn has unironically recommended the communist manifesto for reading material

While looking for the post, I found this one too



I'd take his ideas of what's "far left" with a grain of salt

If you were intelligent enough to actually know what I was talking about, that post was referring to automation and AI leading us to a point of post-scarcity where labor and money have no meaning.

Please feel free to lay down your expertise and tell me where i'm wrong instead of sniping quotes like a retard and exposing yourself.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Exactly. The entire system moved way, way to the right.

The New Deal was basically a social-democratic program, same with LBJ's Great Society. If this natural trajectory had continued, we'd have had Bernie Sanders' current proposals by the 1980s.

Yet here we are in the tail end of the 2010s and Bernie is a radical that's too idealistic. Fucking unbelievable.

In the early 1990s after getting absolutely crushed in three straight presidential elections and four out of five, the party made some changes. The country was facing a serious crime problem, and debt was a real problem (the last time it has been), and Democrats were regarded by the public as not paying enough attention to either issue. Democrats moved to get tougher on crime and tighter with welfare spending (at a time when the economy was booming, though), while also pushing for more revenue. They did push for single payer, though it failed, and then they got SCHIP. After they lost control of gov't again, and Republican unified gov't was a disastrous failure, they felt more comfortable pulling left, and the success of Obama's presidency led to a lot of Democrats wanting to move even further left and faster, which actually cost some support and led to the GOP regaining complete control despite not being particularly popular.

 

[lecter]

The New Deal was basically a social-democratic program, same with LBJ's Great Society. If this natural trajectory had continued

What, in your opinion, makes it natural?

We don't have a left wing party in this country. We have a center-right party (with a left wing fringe) and a firmly right wing party (with a far right fringe).

What scale/standard do you use?
Do you start from what you believe is the center in the US and go from there or are you trying to compare the US to other nations and their parties/policies around the globe?

 

[Jack V Savage]

Correctamundo. We don't have a left wing party in this country. We have a center-right party (with a left wing fringe) and a firmly right wing party (with a far right fringe). Somebody mentioned Eisenhower, he'd be considered so far left as to make people blush by today's standards. FDR would basically be a "communist".

At the time, the whacko right did consider Eisenhower to be a communist, and the whacko left considered FDR to be a corporate sellout.

 

[ChainFlow]

In the early 1990s after getting absolutely crushed in three straight presidential elections and four out of five, the party made some changes. The country was facing a serious crime problem, and debt was a real problem (the last time it has been), and Democrats were regarded by the public as not paying enough attention to either issue. Democrats moved to get tougher on crime and tighter with welfare spending (at a time when the economy was booming, though), while also pushing for more revenue. They did push for single payer, though it failed, and then they got SCHIP. After they lost control of gov't again, and Republican unified gov't was a disastrous failure, they felt more comfortable pulling left, and the success of Obama's presidency led to a lot of Democrats wanting to move even further left and faster, which actually cost some support and led to the GOP regaining complete control despite not being particularly popular.

I'm with you up until the end. I think your characterization of Democrat behavior is inaccurate. They were perceived as no longer being friendly to labor / blue collar workers, and with reason. I think you underestimate the amount of blue collar workers who did not trust Clinton to not pull another NAFTA on them like her husband did.

I have a lot of family in state-level politics, and the message they were getting was that it wasn't that the blue collar workers thought that the Democrats were "too left" - it's that the Democrats were focusing their platform on "left" things that were only left in the modern sense, and they felt abandoned.

 

[Falsedawn]

What, in your opinion, makes it natural?


What scale/standard do you use?
Do you start from what you believe is the center in the US and go from there or are you trying to compare the US to other nations and their parties/policies around the globe?

I use the political spectrum, with the far left being anarchists/communists and the far right being monarchists/fascists.

I do this because our political spectrum is already right wing, if we were going to use a US-centric spectrum then previous presidents like FDR, LBJ, and Eisenhower would be off of the scale to the left. Our entire political process has shifted to the right as of recent, let's not act like we haven't had true left wing parties before.

 

[Pwent]

If you were intelligent enough to actually know what I was talking about, that post was referring to automation and AI leading us to a point of post-scarcity where labor and money have no meaning.

Please feel free to lay down your expertise and tell me where i'm wrong instead of sniping quotes like a retard and exposing yourself.

In that post you said you read Marx and that you think the endgame of capitalism is communism

 

[Scott Parker 27]

Well look at this, the normal conservanuts think that the democrats have moved more to the left because of obama. In reality both parties have shifted more to the extreme of their beliefs. Democrats to the right, Republicans to the right.

 

[Falsedawn]

In that post you said you read Marx and that you think the endgame of capitalism is communism

Jesus fuck you're a dipshit.

In the VERY BEGINNING of that post, I mention post scarcity, that's because the context of that discussion is Automation and AI leading to that state, at which point capitalism becomes untenable as an economic philosophy. Don't believe me? Here's the post I made before it.

Once you get to post-scarcity, minimum income/living standards become basically useless because there is a surplus of everything (so in a way, everything is free). Obviously not EVERYTHING will be free, but labor is effectively reduced to a maintenance level with the advent of technology to do it for us. You could mandate 10 hours of maintenance work a week and leave all surplus labor to the people to research, discover, and create according to their wills, not their needs. It's a perpetual state of self-actualization, in which a person is bound only by their inherent genetic limits.

When you get to that point, social recognition becomes a currency in itself, where the exceptional are revered in the pantheon of humanity, while average people can live average lives as they see fit without worry of basic necessities.

Edit: I'm a huge fan of Marx, and here is his take on Post-scarcity, from The Grundrisse

You dumb son of a bitch, you can't even quote snipe right without shooting yourself in the face. Wew boy.

 

[Jack V Savage]

I'm with you up until the end. I think your characterization of Democrat behavior is inaccurate. They were perceived as no longer being friendly to labor / blue collar workers, and with reason. I think you underestimate the amount of blue collar workers who did not trust Clinton to not pull another NAFTA on them like her husband did.

I have a lot of family in state-level politics, and the message they were getting was that it wasn't that the blue collar workers thought that the Democrats were "too left" - it's that the Democrats were focusing their platform on "left" things that were only left in the modern sense, and they felt abandoned.

I don't think there was any reason to think that the party is less of a pro-labor/pro-blue-collar one. They've moved *more* in that direction while losing support, and the reason is rising expectations. And my difference on NAFTA would be, in order:

1. It's actually good.
2. Republicans deserve more credit for it.
3. There's no way Clinton would have been able to expand free trade in the present environment.
4. Opening up trade has pretty much one-time effects, and almost all the fruit there has already been picked.

As for your last point, I think the issue is more complicated. But note that we aren't seeing voters more to their right economically--we're seeing voters with left-wing economic ideas being more willing to vote for politicians with right-wing economic ideas or to stay out of the process.

 

[ChainFlow]

Well look at this, the normal conservanuts think that the democrats have moved more to the left because of obama. In reality both parties have shifted more to the extreme of their beliefs. Democrats to the right, Republicans to the right.

Yes, both parties have moved to the right economically. Socially both parties have moved somewhat "progressive", though the Democrats have obviously moved much farther on that axis and the Republicans have more or less just grudgingly agreed that gay sex shouldn't be illegal.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Yes, both parties have moved to the right economically. Socially both parties have moved somewhat "progressive", though the Democrats have obviously moved much farther on that axis and the Republicans have more or less just grudgingly agreed that gay sex shouldn't be illegal.

I think on the right in America, there's kind of a constant problem, which is how to get majority support for an agenda that is economically harmful to the majority. Being "tough on crime" worked when crime was at scary high levels, then being religious worked, and now it's playing on racial resentment (which is always in the background, of course). But these hot-button social issues are like finishing moves in wrestling--people develop an immunity to them over time (world titles in the past have changed hands on a simple vertical suplex and a flying bodypress). So we get a continual leftward drift on social stuff, but it's much harder to get a consistent move in a particular economic direction.

 

[xcvbn]

The premise of this thread is completely off-base. It's a self-serving heap of shit that fails to identify even the most basic problems of the Democratic party--likely because OP is a partisan shitlord who refuses to see the numerous parallels between their Republican party/right wing politics with the left.

Not voting.

 

[HomerThompson]

@Falsedawn has unironically recommended the communist manifesto for reading material

While looking for the post, I found this one too



I'd take his ideas of what's "far left" with a grain of salt

Oh look, character attacks. Shocking.

 

[ChainFlow]

I don't think there was any reason to think that the party is less of a pro-labor/pro-blue-collar one. They've moved *more* in that direction while losing support, and the reason is rising expectations. And my difference on NAFTA would be, in order:

1. It's actually good.
2. Republicans deserve more credit for it.
3. There's no way Clinton would have been able to expand free trade in the present environment.
4. Opening up trade has pretty much one-time effects, and almost all the fruit there has already been picked.

As for your last point, I think the issue is more complicated. But note that we aren't seeing voters more to their right economically--we're seeing voters with left-wing economic ideas being more willing to vote for politicians with right-wing economic ideas or to stay out of the process.

We both know that while NAFTA had its upsides it also didn't create the boom of jobs in the US that was promised and actively accelerated the disappearance of a ton of solidly middle class manufacturing jobs. You could convincingly argue that those jobs would have disappeared anyway (I'm not sure, but they definitely would have shrunk), but I'm more talking about the perception from the affected workers. B Clinton talked often and proudly about the glories of globalization, and we all love cheap goods, but the ones who were most hurt by it were the core of the Democratic Party (at least here in the Midwest) - manufacturing workers in unions. Second/third order effects aren't really something the electorate pays attention to. And the lack of appropriate remedy was definitely begrudged.

Labor felt betrayed by the Third Way Democrats, and they haven't forgiven the Clintons. Your last sentence, talking about left wing voters staying out of the process - that's exactly the issue I'm circumspectly describing. A feeling of abandonment.

The Democrats have attempted to pivot to making a new core of highly educated professionals while simultaneously favoring finance and employer interests over employee (compared to what they used to), but the professionals just don't have the numbers to make up for the drop in enthusiasm among laborers.

I know too many people who went for Trump just because they want to reset the system. It wasn't smart and they're screwing themselves, but the messaging and the focus of the platform of the Democratic Party has not been about their interests since Bill. Blaming the Sanders wing for Trump is not going to fix any of that, and I say that not as a snipe or anything but out of a kind of despair.

 

[Fawlty]

I don't think we've moved socially left on balance. Gay marriage and...what? A brief period of government going after racially predatory loans and police behavior? We're still throwing people in jail at alarming rates, we still don't meet mental health needs, still have an antiquated criminalization approach to drug addiction. Education has been moving right, abortion is moving right, welfare moved right a long time ago, immigration has spun its wheels, the states have been empowered to steal money by civil forfeiture, on and on.

 

[RubberGuard5]

Economics.

Social values are all well and good, but even the farthest left social views are undercut if you allow social heirarchies based on wealth. It's the antithesis of egalitarianism and social cooperation, which are firmly left wing economic views. A true left wing party would advocate for labor unions, social cooperation in the workplace, investment in the economy via wealth redistribution and progressive tax rates, and in extreme cases, destruction of capitalist entities that don't stand up to the egalitarian social goal. Democrats are free market capitalists who eschew a social market economy and industrial democracy in favor of free trade and Corporatism. That places them firmly right wing with regard to economics, their social views temper that to a center-right party overall.

Wouldn't you need to create different form of hierarchies to prevent social hierarchies based on wealth? How would that even work?