Why the Democrats are not a left-wing party

Skynet · January 20, 2021, 06:30:11 PM

It is often said internationally that the United States has a two-party system: a moderate/center-right party, and a far-right one. This is often in reference to how Canada and various European countries have healthcare and public transit being more or less completely nationalized, concepts that have yet to catch on in the United States. Even though two policies alone don’t make one left-wing, there is a hint of truth in that leftist movements and political parties domestic and abroad are not impressed by the Democratic Party’s principles. Even when looking at the Left-Right spectrum under an entirely US context, the group isn’t very left-wing on a lot of key issues or can do much better on the issues where they do happen to align with leftists.

Furthermore, there’s also a common claim that the Democratic Party as a whole are socialists or socialist-friendly. While the party does have two self-defined socialist members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they're outliers of a tiny progressive wing that the rest of the party and their financial backers do not necessarily want. Although there are anarchists and communists who do vote Democrat, it’s often out of a ‘lesser of two evils’ when contrasted against the Republicans, and said voters’ more radical goals (workplace democracy, end all foreign militarism, etc) are not given much weight by the Party establishment when it comes to policy. Compare this in contrast with Republicans, whose more extreme elements are given weight and credence by the leadership, which I cover in-depth in “The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain” section.

I realize that this is a rather large post, so I put the major sections into spoiler blocks. Sources will be cited within the relevant blocks and not at the end of the post proper, for ease of reference and scrolling if nothing else. I did my best to use credible sources for this. Some are locked behind paywalls. In that case, open up the links in incognito windows in order to view them.

A Brief Overview of Leftism

A Brief Overview of Leftism

Leftism as a broad term supports social equality and egalitarianism as ideals, in both economic and non-economic issues. In modern times socialism is the predominant leftist ideology, encompassing all manner of anarchists, communists, and more than a few social democrats. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it evolved from general anti-monarchism to an increased emphasis on anti-capitalism when robber barons and global industry replaced aristocracies as the major world powers. Socialism became the most popular brand of leftism since, with more specialized concepts (Trade Unionism, Feminism, Environmentalism, etc) championed on their own or as part of the broader label.

Without going into too much detail, socialism posits public ownership of the means of production, which means that every major economic industry (but not personal items such as clothes and toothbrushes) would ideally be collectively managed by the populace via majority vote as a primary means of dispute resolution. Communists and anarchists both wanted to replace capitalism with a classless, moneyless, and nationless society, but disagreed as to the means to reach this goal. Communists believed that the transition to such a utopia would take time, and that adopting the hierarchical tools of the State to help lead the people down this road was a necessary evil. Anarchists disagreed, believing that such power would corrupt even with the best of intentions and would rather demolish the State as soon as possible. The Communists won out on the world stage in the 20th century, and Marxist-Leninism (a sub-ideology created by Josef Stalin) asserted that a centrally-planned economy replacing private industry and dictating economic policies was the best way moving forward. In theory under this model, the State would voluntarily disband once capitalism was well and truly gone. Most other Eastern Bloc nations and Soviet client states followed suit in its adoption, reliant upon the empire’s funding and weapons in the fight against the West.

As of today, the most popular self-defined Communist ideology is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. After the mass deaths and chaos caused by Chairman Mao during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, there were many whose faith in the Chinese Communist Party was greatly shaken. More moderate elements led by the country’s leader Deng Xiaoping sought to adapt elements of private property and capitalism during a series of market reforms in the late 70s. Relying upon quotes by Marx and Engels who asserted that true Communism had to evolve out of capitalist societies, Xiaoping’s adherents asserted that China must first become capitalist as a stepping stone in the road towards a nationless, classless, and moneyless society.

You know all those jokes about how China is actually capitalism on steroids, what with their excessive use of child labor, suicide nets in factories, letting billionaries join their Communist Party, and the outlawing of labor unions? That’s not a bug, but a feature in their system. It certainly puts them in contradiction to just about every other Communist ideology out there, but due to sheer numbers (the Chinese Communist Party has around 90 million members) they more or less set the definition for what many people define as Communism in East Asia. Much like how the Catholic Church sets the definition for Christianity in most of Latin America, regardless of what other denominations may or may not teach.

Social Democracy (not to be confused with Democratic Socialism) came about in the 20th century, partly out of a rejection of Soviet authoritarianism and seeking reformation first rather than violent revolution as a means of dealing with inequalities under capitalism. Generally speaking, social democrats adopt policies of “here and now” harm reduction, whether or not they seek a post-capitalist world. Nationalism of certain industries for the public good, collective bargaining, and other mixed-market economy solutions are preferred. Some may support this as an end goal for a theoretical post-capitalist society, while others view a progressive welfare state with regulated private ownership of industry as a viable end in and of itself.

In the interests of disclosure, I myself am a Social Democrat; or rather I feel that said ideology is the closest to my values. With that out of the way, I’ll demonstrate below why in many key areas the Democratic Party’s mainstream aren’t even good Social Democrats, much less Socialists.

Corporate SuperPACs, or The Billionaire as a Single-Issue Voter

Corporate SuperPACs, or The Billionaire As a Single-Issue Voter

Back in 2012, a pair of bills known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) caused lots of controversy. In theory they were meant to combat online piracy and safeguard creator rights, but in practice were ineffective at their stated goals while also allowing exemptions for multinational corporations who profited off of stolen content. Protests against these Acts were widespread online, but the major cable news networks didn’t cover these controversies.[1] Not even the vaunted MSNBC and CNN news stations, who are regarded as the “left-leaning” orgs of the big five networks, did so at the time.

This was intentional. Major news sites and aggregates are owned by larger corporations, and corporations by design encourage maximum profit to shareholders. Everything else, including regulations, quality control, and even laws against profiting off of slave labor,[2] are a secondary concern until said issues hit their bottom line. While Republicans are better known as the party of the rich and big business, Democrats are just as beholden to their support. In this election and the past, the Democratic Party establishment heavily supported Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, who are more notably right-leaning than the Sanders and Warren types. The Democratic Party even went as far as to sabotage Sanders’ campaign, as revealed by confidential email exchanges.[3]

Biden, in speaking to his SuperPAC donors and Wall Street tycoons, mollified their worries of “demonizing the rich” by promising them that economically nothing would change.[4] He promised this at a time when we’re in a huge recession, over 100 million Americans are struggling with medical bills, debt, and one paycheck away from economic ruin. Clinton said that Sanders’ attempts to hold white-collar crime accountable would not end racism, in spite of the fact that the very banks she used in her analogy have a long history of contributing to systemic racism and other injustices.[5] Once the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was out of the race for good, hundreds of millions of corporate dollars flooded into Joe Biden’s donation box.[6][7]

While there’s a diversity of ideological views at the personal level for CEOs, in practical terms they always favor laissez-faire capitalism and support candidates promising this, even if they disagree on 99% of other issues. The Koch Brothers are a great example, for they are significant patrons for the Republican Party. Although they define themselves as “small-government Libertarians” in favor of LGBT rights and worry about the rising of a police state, this has not prevented them from donating to President George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns and various other Congressman who championed his values. A President and Party responsible for the PATRIOT Act, one of the most Big Government Acts passed in our generation.[8][9] The bottom line is that while the world’s richest people may align on a personal level with leftist causes, such sympathies play second fiddle to whoever promises them the lowest taxes and least regulation.

Sources Cited:
[1]https://mashable.com/2012/01/11/sopa-news/
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01/nestle-slavery-thailand-fighting-child-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sanders-clinton.html
[4]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/biden-tells-elite-donors-he-doesn-t-want-to-demonize-the-rich
[5]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-line-that-may-have-won-hillary-clinton-the-nomination-40504/
[6]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/25/hours-after-entering-2020-race-biden-attend-big-money-fundraiser-hosted-comcast-blue
[7]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/16/biden-committees-raise-nearly-100-million-as-spielberg-james-murdoch-others-donate.html
[8]https://www.cnn.com/2014/12/14/politics/david-koch-gay-rights-abortion-democrats/index.html
[9]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-164403/

Privatized Healthcare

Privatized Healthcare

Healthcare in the United States is far more expensive than in other industrialized countries, but isn’t necessarily the highest-quality in comparison to Canada, Norway, and other societies with functional social safety nets. Health insurance is completely privatized, and in many cases certain people and illnesses are not profitable to treat. There’s little protection against the alteration of prices for life-saving medicine such as insulin,[10] and common drugs are sold at a far, far greater cost than the price used to make them.[11] The practice of “surprise medical bills” which can charge patients five and six figure sums for treatment they never consented to is completely legal. Even worse, a bill created to end this exploitative practice was opposed by both Richard Neal and Kevin Brady, a respective Democrat and Republican on the House and Ways Committee. They put out their own proposal which ensured that the deal ended up dead in the water. Private equity groups spent 30 million dollars on ad campaigns to keep this practice, and one of those groups is alleged to have donated 30 thousand dollars to Richard Neal.[12]

It’s not just a few bad apples. In spite of overwhelming support from the party’s base, the 2020 DNC platform refused to put Medicare for All as a supported issue, along with decriminalizing marijuana.[13] The Democrat’s current Presidential candidate had nothing but venom for such a proposal, invoking the name of his dead son as an argument against universal healthcare.[14]

Sources Cited:
[10]https://www.businessinsider.com/insulin-price-increased-last-decade-chart-2019-9
[11]https://www.propublica.org/article/horizon-pharma-vimovo-common-medication-455-million-specialty-pill
[12]https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2020/why-congress-cant-stop-surprise-medical-bills/
[13]https://www.salon.com/2020/07/28/dnc-platform-committee-votes-to-reject-medicare-for-all-despite-overwhelming-support-from-voters/
[14]https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5d7y/joe-biden-medicare-for-all-would-be-an-insult-to-my-dead-son

The Military-Industrial Complex

The Military-Industrial Complex

It’s easy to assume that in the two-party system, the Democrats are the dovish party and the Republicans the war hawks. This is true, but only by comparison. There’s also the fact that in recent times the disastrous Iraq War is quite rightly blamed on the Bush Administration, which is fresh in the minds of many Americans. But that does not necessarily mean that the Democratic Party wishes for peacetime. Back in the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, where the privatization of war turned the vital industry of defense into a profit-making one. Although the US military branches are nationalized and under control of the executive branch, the people who build the supplies necessary for their function are private companies. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other such corporations consist of shareholders and CEOs who are not accountable to American voters, but rather the bottom line of their respective companies. And said companies also donate to Democratic candidates as well as Republicans, which in turn informs their policies.

During the Trump Administration, Democrats and Republicans alike blocked attempts at withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.[15] Later that same month, 37 Democrats in the Senate aligned with the GOP to defy an amendment proposed that would cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. The money cut from this was intended to be diverted towards domestic affairs, ranging from education, healthcare, and housing, all of which are in serious need of overhaul. And what’s worse, the money the Pentagon was supposed to use for COVID-19 relief funds went to make more guns and body armor.[16][17][18]

Beyond Congress, what of the party’s recent Presidents and Presidential candidates? Biden wants to further increase military spending.[19] Obama was justly slammed for the disgusting amount of drone strikes which killed far more civilians than actual terrorists.[20] Back in 2014, Hillary defended the Israeli military’s bombing of Gaza, a series of revenge killings that left 33% of the Palestinians in the enclosed city homeless and did mostly civilian casualties as a response to Hamas killing three Israeli teenagers. Sanders was the only Presidential candidate to call this out as unjust, as it is (quite rightly) collective punishment.[21] Support of the Israeli government, even when under extremely right-wing administrations like that of Netanyahu, is mainstream within the Democratic Party, and we give billions of military aid to said country in excess of other nation-states, although recently it’s become harder and harder to justify said support from a liberal or leftist basis. One could quite rightly bring up how Hamas have committed terrorist actions against civilians and have regressive views on women and LGBT people. But the proper leftist response would be to fund neither side. In spite of being more progressive on gender and sexuality, the Israeli government is an ethnostate that isn’t very progressive on racial matters. Not just to the Palestinians, but to Ethiopian Jews who were forcibly sterilized in the 1980s,[22] or the Netanyahu Administration’s claim that its non-Jewish 20% population do not count as citizens.[23]

One could easily point out that to be Left doesn’t necessarily mean being dovish. This is true. However, the fact that the Democratic Party so highly prioritizes the needs and interest of defense contractors over the majority of American citizens puts a hole in that argument. As of this posting, COVID-19 has killed 400,000 Americans. Flint only got clean water last year after half a decade of inaction, our hospitals are at max capacity, and Capitol Hill didn’t even have metal detectors installed until after the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. We have money to spend for tanks and jets, but our Department of Veteran’s Affairs can hardly attend to the health and welfare of those who piloted such instruments of war. Revelations regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shown that the former was a war to secure oil for private corporations that even military brass knew about. As for Afghanistan, it was revealed in a leak of confidential documents highlighting how senior officials knowingly lied about the fact that the war had become unwinnable. Neither the corporate nor military sectors have acted in the best interests of American citizens and soldiers.[24][25]

Sources Cited:
[15]https://thehill.com/policy/defense/505568-house-panel-votes-to-constrain-afghan-drawdown-ask-for-assessment-on
[16]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/23/day-after-voting-down-10-pentagon-cut-37-senate-dems-join-gop-approve-740-billion
[17]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/22/covid-funds-pentagon/
[18]https://thehill.com/policy/defense/518099-40-groups-call-on-house-panel-to-investigate-pentagons-use-of-coronavirus
[19]https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/11/headlines/joe_biden_says_he_may_further_increase_military_spending_if_elected
[20]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/president-obamas-weak-defense-of-his-record-on-drone-strikes/511454/
[21]https://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/hillary-clinton-israel-gaza-109210
[22]https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-foribly-injected-african-immigrant-women-with-birth-control/?sh=4a0805fc67b8
[23]https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/netanyahu-israel-state-jewish-people-61592236
[24]https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html
[25]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

Shortcomings on Racial Solidarity

Shortcomings on Racial Solidarity

People of color in the United States tend to veer Democrat in the big scheme of things. This has been true for decades, although under Trump this has only increased. The veiled white supremacist elements that have previously tried and failed to get mainstream prominence in the GOP achieved this goal once their own got admitted to various government positions and received tacit support from our 45th President. When faced with such a binary system, choosing to vote Democrat is very much a means of survival for those who do not fit into the cishet white Christian demographic.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party often takes such support for granted. Although they have done their part to make appeals to African-Americans and Jews (albeit slowly for Black Lives Matter),[26] they haven’t caught up as much with other ethnicities. When it comes to Latinos, many liberals tend to view them as a monolithic bloc; said group comprises many races and nationalities who can have very different priorities as voters.[27] The Cuban-American community is very concerned about the Castro regime and traditionally vote Republican due to said party being perceived as the most anti-Communist. Puerto Ricans are US citizens by default due to their homeland’s Commonwealth status, so issues surrounding immigration are of little concern to them. A good example showcasing this is during the 2020 elections when most Cuban-Americans hewed towards Trump, but most Puerto Ricans hewed towards Biden. Trump failed the latter group when he said that their island wasn’t part of the US, and did nothing as its people were battered by hurricanes.

Many Democrats often assume that immigration is the largest and only issue that Latinos care about.[28] This is an important issue, but not the only one. Many Latinos prioritize affordable, quality healthcare, and also candidates who continue listening to them after winning the race. This last part is particularly bad, as Democrats have a poor track record of not turning out for them until the election is weeks aways. And only then do they deign to talk about their issues and not during the next 2-6 years of Congressional/Presidential terms. Similar stories come out of the Asian-American community. In spite of being the fastest-growing group of eligible voters, they feel that they aren’t being listened to by the Big Two parties, and voter outreach to said communities has been negligible.[29]

In taking certain minority groups for granted, this allowed certain Republican figures headway. Native Americans are only 0.5% of the population, and half of them live on reservations which are politically autonomous territories. This means that unless you are running on the local level or in Arizona (whose land is 1/4th Navajo Nation reservation and helped flip the state Blue in 2020), you don’t really need to appeal to indigenous people as a voting bloc. Being ignored for so long means that Native people can end up with very different views of political figures than the general public. The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina is a great example, for Trump was the first President in US history to promise them federal recognition as a tribe should he be re-elected in 2020.[30] For an older example, the much-villified Richard Nixon is remembered more warmly in indigenous communities. His policies increased funding for tribal governments, granted back ownership of seized sacred lands in record numbers, and sought to pass an attempted Act which would grant them increased self-management of affairs.[31] Even though both US Presidents appealed strongly to racist groups and enacted policies that harmed minorities, making promises to smaller communities who have so little can be enough to secure their loyalty.

It’s easy to look at voting data and conclude that people of color voting Democrat are having their needs attended and listened to by the party. But this sadly is not the case for many.

Sources Cited:
[26]https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dnc-black-lives-matter-memo_n_57c6f80de4b078581f1072ca
[27]https://www.univision.com/univision-news/opinion/so-called-latino-vote-is-32-million-americans-with-diverse-political-opinions-and-national-origins
[28]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/17/voto-latino-interview-2020-election-429857
[29]https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article242690821.html
[30]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/10/robeson-county-rural-rainbow-coalition-north-carolina-trump-republicans-443978
[31]https://theconversation.com/which-us-presidents-actually-tried-to-benefit-native-americans-heres-what-history-says-80331

Social Programs to Combat Socialism

Social Programs to Combat Socialism

Former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson are regarded as being liberal and left-wing for their most well-known policies: the New Deal in FDR’s case and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty in Johnson’s case. One could definitely argue that both Presidents were Social Democrats in their use of State power to aid society’s disenfranchised. Many Democrats celebrate these policies as a reflection of their proposed values and evidence that reliance upon corporate charity to fix societal problems is a losing game.

Said initiatives were not done with a socialist society in mind, even if they had egalitarian principles. Roosevelt rejected the socialist label multiple times, even though he was opposed to laissez-faire capitalism.[32] Even before allying with them against the Nazis, the Soviet Union’s authoritarian society and crackdown on democracy and criticism did not warm Roosevelt and many Americans to their vaunted values. He, and Louisianan Senator Huey Long[33] were cognizant of the fact that a population whose basic needs were denied would turn to alternatives and in turn be easy recruitment for radicalization. If one sees how socialist movements sprung up in the 20th century, there were many commonalities with Depression-era America: China, Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam were struggling agrarian countries under the thumb of neglectful, repressive governments and exploitative business interests. Communist revolutions were successful in no small part due to said revolutionaries being better able to deliver on social programs than the governments they overthrew, even if only for a time.

In Lyndon Johnson’s case, his Great Society was inspired by the New Deal,[34] a set of programs with the planned long-term goal of ending poverty and racial inequality in the United States. This egalitarian vision focused on allocation of federal funds, programs, and laws to create various social safety nets (and enforcement of Constitutional rights in the case of racial minorities) to provide basic living standards, education, and employment. In some cases this involved increased government control in various areas, although the long-term goals were never to nationalize all private industry or to do away with the capitalist economic model. On the contrary, the Johnson Administration was very hawkish and anti-Communist at home and abroad. His policies of continuing the Vietnam War made him very unpopular, whereas in the USA he viewed anti-establishment leftists as a threat who in turn viewed his civil rights initiatives as not going far enough. Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO were FBI and CIA programs which sought to sabotage and undermine the Maoist Black Panthers, the liberal Students for a Democratic Society, and various other progressive groups operating in the US, with Operation CHAOS being specifically created at Johnson’s behest. Although both sides of the political spectrum were targeted, the FBI and CIA arrested, assassinated, and sabotaged left-wing groups far more than right-wing ones such as the KKK and White Citizens Council. This was in no small part due to J. Edgar Hoover having a personal vendetta against civil rights advocates.[35][36]

Although these are historical examples, the current Democratic establishment doesn’t fall far from the tree. They’re still quite anti-socialist, but unlike FDR and Johnson are more or less stripped of the need to attend to the basic needs of Americans in favor of big business. In regards to antifa and avowed American socialists, said groups were no big fans of the chosen front-runner candidates of 2020. Even more so when Biden suggested jailing anarchists[37] and suggested solving police brutality by giving law enforcement even more funds. He also suggested training police to shoot people in the legs; the region of the body with the largest arteries, stupidly enough.[38] While one could argue that by “anarchists” Biden meant the more typical term of “troublemaker,” the fact that many antifa protesters have far-left tendencies (anarchism included) does not paint him as a sympathizer of theirs by any generous stretch. When contrasted with his support of police institutions in the wake of the nationwide George Floyd protests, he’s giving the impression that he views state-sanctioned violence against disenfranchised groups as a lesser threat than the liberals and leftists rebelling to enact a more just system.

Sources Cited:
[32]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622
[33]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMUx4AQl5tI
[34]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
[35]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS
[36]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[37]https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4895925/user-clip-prosecute-anarchists
[38]https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/defund-the-police-joe-biden-cops/

The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain

The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain

Image taken from a Manhattan Republican club that invited the Proud Boys to attend.

When Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he did so at the expense of alienating the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party who tended to be single-issue voters on this. Barry Goldwater won the Bible Belt during his Presidential campaign and nowhere else. This was due to his stated willingness to preemptively launch nuclear missiles at Soviet territory if he became President, which scared the hell out of every other voting bloc. The Republican Party back then was mostly a group of laissez-faire capitalists and big businessmen who had trouble reaching the “common folk” with their policies. Additionally, their status as the hated Party of Lincoln meant that virtually no Republicans ran in the Jim Crow South: all elections there were Democrat vs Democrat.

The segregationist holdovers were left drying in the wind for a time, surviving as backwards third parties until Republicans swept them up via the Southern Strategy.[39] Via a series of coded messages now popularized as “dog whistle politics,” Presidential candidate Richard Nixon signaled his sympathies to racist fears and resentment of changing times. But by exploiting various facets of hot-button social issues (abortion, prayer in public school, women’s rights, etc) the Republicans made an alliance with white evangelicals also based out of the South. Previously a demographic who viewed politicians in general as sinful hypocrites, many evangelicals saw the legalization of abortion, the threatening losses of tax-exempt status for private Christian colleges that still maintained whites-only policies, the Equal Rights Amendment that would make it illegal for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sex, and pushback against the radical violence of the 60s and 70s served as fertile territory to bring in voters that felt abandoned by the liberal Democrats.[40] Reagan courted the evangelicals during his Presidential campaign, and ever since the Republican Party has been a cocktail blend of unrestrained capitalism, white racist resentment, and Christian fundamentalism.

Such an array of strange bedfellows proved antithetical to recruiting new blood over time. There are many non-Christians, people of color, and LGBT people who can be sympathetic to aspects of Republican Party platforms, both social and economic. To say nothing of other groups, such as voters feeling betrayed by the Iraq War’s false premise, those reliant upon Social Security and other programs Republicans wish to cut, and so on and so forth. However, the above trifecta frequently meant that said groups often remained outliers, and after Trump was elected president the bigoted elements of the party have been more open and emboldened. After Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election, a “GOP Autopsy Report” conducted by various experts researching their Party’s decline found the flight of centrist and otherwise conservative voters to be one factor among several.[41] With the majority of Republican Congress members backing Trump scandal after scandal and various alliances with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists,[42][43]political moderates and even many conservatives now saw a Party they wanted nothing to do with. There were reports that moderate Republicans have been gradually disappearing from the Party as far back as 1996,[44] and in the 2012 Presidential Campaign the “middle of the road” Jon Huntsman finished third, beaten by a write-in comedian Stephen Colbert in the otherwise conservative bastion of South Carolina. [45]

This has the obvious effect of filling the Democratic Party with more centrist and center-right elements, bringing the overall group away from the left while also pushing the Republican Party to the extreme right. Not just the members of Congress, but the rank and file, too. The supposed moderate Never Trump Republicans turned out to be politically negligible in terms of voter numbers.[46] A Gallup poll in late 2020 shown that 95% of Republicans approved of Trump’s actions while in office, at a time when people were dying from COVID in the hundreds of thousands.[47] A President who was recorded on tape saying to Bob Woodward that he sought to downplay the dangers of the disease, but would later go on to claim that it’s a hoax and then not that big of a deal.[48]

A 2020 YouGov poll with a nationwide sample of 1.5 thousand discovered that around half of Republicans would refuse a COVID vaccine if it was devloped.[49] A later YouGov poll with a similar sample size also found that roughly the same number of Republicans approved of violent rioters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.[50] Said insurrection was done based on the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump, in spite of his own Attorney General disagreeing,[51] his own personal lawyers not saying so when under oath in court,[52] and being caught on tape asking an election official in Georgia to “come up with” a highly specific number of votes to turn the state in his favor.[53] Around half of Republicans believe that the QAnon conspiracy theories are partly or mostly true.[54] Said conspiracy theory alleges that there’s a secret sex trafficking ring run by Satanist pedophiles who consume the adrenal glands of children to attain immortal status. And furthermore, that President Trump is waging a secret war against them.

When you have these people as your political opposition, just about anyone can look liberal and sane by comparison.

Sources Cited:
[39]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
[40]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
[41]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/
[42]https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=309264.0
[43]https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=306798.0
[44]https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disappearing-political-center-congress-and-the-incredible-shrinking-middle/
[45]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9011991/US-Election-2012-comedian-polls-ahead-of-Jon-Huntsman-in-South-Carolina-presidency-bid.html
[46]https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34576561/never-trump-republicans-lincoln-project-2020/
[47]https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
[48]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/09/trump-coronavirus-deadly-downplayed-risk-410796
[49]https://today.yougov.com/topics/health/articles-reports/2020/07/17/americans-wont-get-vaccinated
[50]https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/06/US-capitol-trump-poll
[51]https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud-b1f1488796c9a98c4b1a9061a6c7f49d
[52]https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/
[53]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html
[54]https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/02/majority-of-republicans-believe-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-is-partly-or-mostly-true-survey-finds/?sh=12747d535231

In Conclusion

In Conclusion

The Democratic Party does have a code and ideology it adheres to, but it is not one that matches any of the popular leftist ideologies. They’re clearly neither anarchists or communists, for they have no plans to jettison the capitalist economy. Are they social democrats in the vein of Roosevelt’s New Deal? Clearly not, for they are notoriously unwilling to divert aid in repairing America’s vital infrastructure or put the brakes on environmentally-damaging big business like fracking and fossil fuel subsidies.[55][56] And especially not so if it would cause even a slight decrease in needless military spending. People like AOC and Sanders shout up a storm, but they’re just two figures in a 500+ person Congress. And what about hot-button social issues like race and gender? They’re supportive...to a point.

The closest definition of a Democratic Party ideology would be neoliberal, but with a neutered social democrat wing. The term is virtually unknown in the US proper, but globally speaking neoliberal refers to those who are in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, regardless or independent of social issues. The Republicans, by contrast, are a fascist party. They make appeals to and base policy off of racial resentment, claim to be small-government but are big government when it comes to human rights and the police state, they only tolerate the democratic process as a necessary evil rather than something worthy to uphold in and of itself, and entertain scientific falsehoods and conspiracy theories which result in real-world harm. The fact that neither party acknowledges these as their official ideologies muddies the waters further, causing people to look at them as Left vs Right or Big Government vs Small Government.

So what should we take from this? First off, the American political spectrum is not Left vs Right, but rather Centrist vs Far Right. Additionally, putting more Democrats in power is a great place to start, but a terrible place to end. Having the two parties as they are in the here and now enter into bipartisan unity and compromise will result in a center-right solution. A solution which is hardly ideal for the working class and disenfranchised.

I thank everyone who read this far. I’ve been working on this project for months and put a lot of effort into it.

Sources Cited:
[55]https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-polls-fracking/
[56]https://earther.gizmodo.com/democrats-quietly-cut-opposition-to-fossil-fuel-subsidi-1844768172

joeman · January 20, 2021, 09:19:29 PM

Quote from: Skynet on January 20, 2021, 06:30:11 PM
It is often said internationally that the United States has a two-party system: a moderate/center-right party, and a far-right one. This is often in reference to how Canada and various European countries have healthcare and public transit being more or less completely nationalized, concepts that have yet to catch on in the United States. Even though two policies alone don’t make one left-wing, there is a hint of truth in that leftist movements and political parties domestic and abroad are not impressed by the Democratic Party’s principles. Even when looking at the Left-Right spectrum under an entirely US context, the group isn’t very left-wing on a lot of key issues or can do much better on the issues where they do happen to align with leftists.

Furthermore, there’s also a common claim that the Democratic Party as a whole are socialists or socialist-friendly. While the party does have two self-defined socialist members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they're outliers of a tiny progressive wing that the rest of the party and their financial backers do not necessarily want. Although there are anarchists and communists who do vote Democrat, it’s often out of a ‘lesser of two evils’ when contrasted against the Republicans, and said voters’ more radical goals (workplace democracy, end all foreign militarism, etc) are not given much weight by the Party establishment when it comes to policy. Compare this in contrast with Republicans, whose more extreme elements are given weight and credence by the leadership, which I cover in-depth in “The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain” section.

I realize that this is a rather large post, so I put the major sections into spoiler blocks. Sources will be cited within the relevant blocks and not at the end of the post proper, for ease of reference and scrolling if nothing else. I did my best to use credible sources for this. Some are locked behind paywalls. In that case, open up the links in incognito windows in order to view them.

A Brief Overview of Leftism
A Brief Overview of Leftism

Leftism as a broad term supports social equality and egalitarianism as ideals, in both economic and non-economic issues. In modern times socialism is the predominant leftist ideology, encompassing all manner of anarchists, communists, and more than a few social democrats. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it evolved from general anti-monarchism to an increased emphasis on anti-capitalism when robber barons and global industry replaced aristocracies as the major world powers. Socialism became the most popular brand of leftism since, with more specialized concepts (Trade Unionism, Feminism, Environmentalism, etc) championed on their own or as part of the broader label.

Without going into too much detail, socialism posits public ownership of the means of production, which means that every major economic industry (but not personal items such as clothes and toothbrushes) would ideally be collectively managed by the populace via majority vote as a primary means of dispute resolution. Communists and anarchists both wanted to replace capitalism with a classless, moneyless, and nationless society, but disagreed as to the means to reach this goal. Communists believed that the transition to such a utopia would take time, and that adopting the hierarchical tools of the State to help lead the people down this road was a necessary evil. Anarchists disagreed, believing that such power would corrupt even with the best of intentions and would rather demolish the State as soon as possible. The Communists won out on the world stage in the 20th century, and Marxist-Leninism (a sub-ideology created by Josef Stalin) asserted that a centrally-planned economy replacing private industry and dictating economic policies was the best way moving forward. In theory under this model, the State would voluntarily disband once capitalism was well and truly gone. Most other Eastern Bloc nations and Soviet client states followed suit in its adoption, reliant upon the empire’s funding and weapons in the fight against the West.

As of today, the most popular self-defined Communist ideology is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. After the mass deaths and chaos caused by Chairman Mao during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, there were many whose faith in the Chinese Communist Party was greatly shaken. More moderate elements led by the country’s leader Deng Xiaoping sought to adapt elements of private property and capitalism during a series of market reforms in the late 70s. Relying upon quotes by Marx and Engels who asserted that true Communism had to evolve out of capitalist societies, Xiaoping’s adherents asserted that China must first become capitalist as a stepping stone in the road towards a nationless, classless, and moneyless society.

You know all those jokes about how China is actually capitalism on steroids, what with their excessive use of child labor, suicide nets in factories, letting billionaries join their Communist Party, and the outlawing of labor unions? That’s not a bug, but a feature in their system. It certainly puts them in contradiction to just about every other Communist ideology out there, but due to sheer numbers (the Chinese Communist Party has around 90 million members) they more or less set the definition for what many people define as Communism in East Asia. Much like how the Catholic Church sets the definition for Christianity in most of Latin America, regardless of what other denominations may or may not teach.

Social Democracy (not to be confused with Democratic Socialism) came about in the 20th century, partly out of a rejection of Soviet authoritarianism and seeking reformation first rather than violent revolution as a means of dealing with inequalities under capitalism. Generally speaking, social democrats adopt policies of “here and now” harm reduction, whether or not they seek a post-capitalist world. Nationalism of certain industries for the public good, collective bargaining, and other mixed-market economy solutions are preferred. Some may support this as an end goal for a theoretical post-capitalist society, while others view a progressive welfare state with regulated private ownership of industry as a viable end in and of itself.

In the interests of disclosure, I myself am a Social Democrat; or rather I feel that said ideology is the closest to my values. With that out of the way, I’ll demonstrate below why in many key areas the Democratic Party’s mainstream aren’t even good Social Democrats, much less Socialists.

Corporate SuperPACs, or The Billionaire as a Single-Issue Voter
Corporate SuperPACs, or The Billionaire As a Single-Issue Voter

Back in 2012, a pair of bills known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) caused lots of controversy. In theory they were meant to combat online piracy and safeguard creator rights, but in practice were ineffective at their stated goals while also allowing exemptions for multinational corporations who profited off of stolen content. Protests against these Acts were widespread online, but the major cable news networks didn’t cover these controversies.[1] Not even the vaunted MSNBC and CNN news stations, who are regarded as the “left-leaning” orgs of the big five networks, did so at the time.

This was intentional. Major news sites and aggregates are owned by larger corporations, and corporations by design encourage maximum profit to shareholders. Everything else, including regulations, quality control, and even laws against profiting off of slave labor,[2] are a secondary concern until said issues hit their bottom line. While Republicans are better known as the party of the rich and big business, Democrats are just as beholden to their support. In this election and the past, the Democratic Party establishment heavily supported Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, who are more notably right-leaning than the Sanders and Warren types. The Democratic Party even went as far as to sabotage Sanders’ campaign, as revealed by confidential email exchanges.[3]

Biden, in speaking to his SuperPAC donors and Wall Street tycoons, mollified their worries of “demonizing the rich” by promising them that economically nothing would change.[4] He promised this at a time when we’re in a huge recession, over 100 million Americans are struggling with medical bills, debt, and one paycheck away from economic ruin. Clinton said that Sanders’ attempts to hold white-collar crime accountable would not end racism, in spite of the fact that the very banks she used in her analogy have a long history of contributing to systemic racism and other injustices.[5] Once the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was out of the race for good, hundreds of millions of corporate dollars flooded into Joe Biden’s donation box.[6][7]

While there’s a diversity of ideological views at the personal level for CEOs, in practical terms they always favor laissez-faire capitalism and support candidates promising this, even if they disagree on 99% of other issues. The Koch Brothers are a great example, for they are significant patrons for the Republican Party. Although they define themselves as “small-government Libertarians” in favor of LGBT rights and worry about the rising of a police state, this has not prevented them from donating to President George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns and various other Congressman who championed his values. A President and Party responsible for the PATRIOT Act, one of the most Big Government Acts passed in our generation.[8][9] The bottom line is that while the world’s richest people may align on a personal level with leftist causes, such sympathies play second fiddle to whoever promises them the lowest taxes and least regulation.

Sources Cited:
[1]https://mashable.com/2012/01/11/sopa-news/
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01/nestle-slavery-thailand-fighting-child-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sanders-clinton.html
[4]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/biden-tells-elite-donors-he-doesn-t-want-to-demonize-the-rich
[5]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-line-that-may-have-won-hillary-clinton-the-nomination-40504/
[6]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/25/hours-after-entering-2020-race-biden-attend-big-money-fundraiser-hosted-comcast-blue
[7]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/16/biden-committees-raise-nearly-100-million-as-spielberg-james-murdoch-others-donate.html
[8]https://www.cnn.com/2014/12/14/politics/david-koch-gay-rights-abortion-democrats/index.html
[9]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-164403/

Privatized Healthcare
Privatized Healthcare

Healthcare in the United States is far more expensive than in other industrialized countries, but isn’t necessarily the highest-quality in comparison to Canada, Norway, and other societies with functional social safety nets. Health insurance is completely privatized, and in many cases certain people and illnesses are not profitable to treat. There’s little protection against the alteration of prices for life-saving medicine such as insulin,[10] and common drugs are sold at a far, far greater cost than the price used to make them.[11] The practice of “surprise medical bills” which can charge patients five and six figure sums for treatment they never consented to is completely legal. Even worse, a bill created to end this exploitative practice was opposed by both Richard Neal and Kevin Brady, a respective Democrat and Republican on the House and Ways Committee. They put out their own proposal which ensured that the deal ended up dead in the water. Private equity groups spent 30 million dollars on ad campaigns to keep this practice, and one of those groups is alleged to have donated 30 thousand dollars to Richard Neal.[12]

It’s not just a few bad apples. In spite of overwhelming support from the party’s base, the 2020 DNC platform refused to put Medicare for All as a supported issue, along with decriminalizing marijuana.[13] The Democrat’s current Presidential candidate had nothing but venom for such a proposal, invoking the name of his dead son as an argument against universal healthcare.[14]

Sources Cited:
[10]https://www.businessinsider.com/insulin-price-increased-last-decade-chart-2019-9
[11]https://www.propublica.org/article/horizon-pharma-vimovo-common-medication-455-million-specialty-pill
[12]https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2020/why-congress-cant-stop-surprise-medical-bills/
[13]https://www.salon.com/2020/07/28/dnc-platform-committee-votes-to-reject-medicare-for-all-despite-overwhelming-support-from-voters/
[14]https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5d7y/joe-biden-medicare-for-all-would-be-an-insult-to-my-dead-son

The Military-Industrial Complex
The Military-Industrial Complex

It’s easy to assume that in the two-party system, the Democrats are the dovish party and the Republicans the war hawks. This is true, but only by comparison. There’s also the fact that in recent times the disastrous Iraq War is quite rightly blamed on the Bush Administration, which is fresh in the minds of many Americans. But that does not necessarily mean that the Democratic Party wishes for peacetime. Back in the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, where the privatization of war turned the vital industry of defense into a profit-making one. Although the US military branches are nationalized and under control of the executive branch, the people who build the supplies necessary for their function are private companies. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other such corporations consist of shareholders and CEOs who are not accountable to American voters, but rather the bottom line of their respective companies. And said companies also donate to Democratic candidates as well as Republicans, which in turn informs their policies.

During the Trump Administration, Democrats and Republicans alike blocked attempts at withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.[15] Later that same month, 37 Democrats in the Senate aligned with the GOP to defy an amendment proposed that would cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. The money cut from this was intended to be diverted towards domestic affairs, ranging from education, healthcare, and housing, all of which are in serious need of overhaul. And what’s worse, the money the Pentagon was supposed to use for COVID-19 relief funds went to make more guns and body armor.[16][17][18]

Beyond Congress, what of the party’s recent Presidents and Presidential candidates? Biden wants to further increase military spending.[19] Obama was justly slammed for the disgusting amount of drone strikes which killed far more civilians than actual terrorists.[20] Back in 2014, Hillary defended the Israeli military’s bombing of Gaza, a series of revenge killings that left 33% of the Palestinians in the enclosed city homeless and did mostly civilian casualties as a response to Hamas killing three Israeli teenagers. Sanders was the only Presidential candidate to call this out as unjust, as it is (quite rightly) collective punishment.[21] Support of the Israeli government, even when under extremely right-wing administrations like that of Netanyahu, is mainstream within the Democratic Party, and we give billions of military aid to said country in excess of other nation-states, although recently it’s become harder and harder to justify said support from a liberal or leftist basis. One could quite rightly bring up how Hamas have committed terrorist actions against civilians and have regressive views on women and LGBT people. But the proper leftist response would be to fund neither side. In spite of being more progressive on gender and sexuality, the Israeli government is an ethnostate that isn’t very progressive on racial matters. Not just to the Palestinians, but to Ethiopian Jews who were forcibly sterilized in the 1980s,[22] or the Netanyahu Administration’s claim that its non-Jewish 20% population do not count as citizens.[23]

One could easily point out that to be Left doesn’t necessarily mean being dovish. This is true. However, the fact that the Democratic Party so highly prioritizes the needs and interest of defense contractors over the majority of American citizens puts a hole in that argument. As of this posting, COVID-19 has killed 400,000 Americans. Flint only got clean water last year after half a decade of inaction, our hospitals are at max capacity, and Capitol Hill didn’t even have metal detectors installed until after the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. We have money to spend for tanks and jets, but our Department of Veteran’s Affairs can hardly attend to the health and welfare of those who piloted such instruments of war. Revelations regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shown that the former was a war to secure oil for private corporations that even military brass knew about. As for Afghanistan, it was revealed in a leak of confidential documents highlighting how senior officials knowingly lied about the fact that the war had become unwinnable. Neither the corporate nor military sectors have acted in the best interests of American citizens and soldiers.[24][25]

Sources Cited:
[15]https://thehill.com/policy/defense/505568-house-panel-votes-to-constrain-afghan-drawdown-ask-for-assessment-on
[16]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/23/day-after-voting-down-10-pentagon-cut-37-senate-dems-join-gop-approve-740-billion
[17]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/22/covid-funds-pentagon/
[18]https://thehill.com/policy/defense/518099-40-groups-call-on-house-panel-to-investigate-pentagons-use-of-coronavirus
[19]https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/11/headlines/joe_biden_says_he_may_further_increase_military_spending_if_elected
[20]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/president-obamas-weak-defense-of-his-record-on-drone-strikes/511454/
[21]https://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/hillary-clinton-israel-gaza-109210
[22]https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-foribly-injected-african-immigrant-women-with-birth-control/?sh=4a0805fc67b8
[23]https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/netanyahu-israel-state-jewish-people-61592236
[24]https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html
[25]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

Shortcomings on Racial Solidarity
Shortcomings on Racial Solidarity

People of color in the United States tend to veer Democrat in the big scheme of things. This has been true for decades, although under Trump this has only increased. The veiled white supremacist elements that have previously tried and failed to get mainstream prominence in the GOP achieved this goal once their own got admitted to various government positions and received tacit support from our 45th President. When faced with such a binary system, choosing to vote Democrat is very much a means of survival for those who do not fit into the cishet white Christian demographic.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party often takes such support for granted. Although they have done their part to make appeals to African-Americans and Jews (albeit slowly for Black Lives Matter),[26] they haven’t caught up as much with other ethnicities. When it comes to Latinos, many liberals tend to view them as a monolithic bloc; said group comprises many races and nationalities who can have very different priorities as voters.[27] The Cuban-American community is very concerned about the Castro regime and traditionally vote Republican due to said party being perceived as the most anti-Communist. Puerto Ricans are US citizens by default due to their homeland’s Commonwealth status, so issues surrounding immigration are of little concern to them. A good example showcasing this is during the 2020 elections when most Cuban-Americans hewed towards Trump, but most Puerto Ricans hewed towards Biden. Trump failed the latter group when he said that their island wasn’t part of the US, and did nothing as its people were battered by hurricanes.

Many Democrats often assume that immigration is the largest and only issue that Latinos care about.[28] This is an important issue, but not the only one. Many Latinos prioritize affordable, quality healthcare, and also candidates who continue listening to them after winning the race. This last part is particularly bad, as Democrats have a poor track record of not turning out for them until the election is weeks aways. And only then do they deign to talk about their issues and not during the next 2-6 years of Congressional/Presidential terms. Similar stories come out of the Asian-American community. In spite of being the fastest-growing group of eligible voters, they feel that they aren’t being listened to by the Big Two parties, and voter outreach to said communities has been negligible.[29]

In taking certain minority groups for granted, this allowed certain Republican figures headway. Native Americans are only 0.5% of the population, and half of them live on reservations which are politically autonomous territories. This means that unless you are running on the local level or in Arizona (whose land is 1/4th Navajo Nation reservation and helped flip the state Blue in 2020), you don’t really need to appeal to indigenous people as a voting bloc. Being ignored for so long means that Native people can end up with very different views of political figures than the general public. The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina is a great example, for Trump was the first President in US history to promise them federal recognition as a tribe should he be re-elected in 2020.[30] For an older example, the much-villified Richard Nixon is remembered more warmly in indigenous communities. His policies increased funding for tribal governments, granted back ownership of seized sacred lands in record numbers, and sought to pass an attempted Act which would grant them increased self-management of affairs.[31] Even though both US Presidents appealed strongly to racist groups and enacted policies that harmed minorities, making promises to smaller communities who have so little can be enough to secure their loyalty.

It’s easy to look at voting data and conclude that people of color voting Democrat are having their needs attended and listened to by the party. But this sadly is not the case for many.

Sources Cited:
[26]https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dnc-black-lives-matter-memo_n_57c6f80de4b078581f1072ca
[27]https://www.univision.com/univision-news/opinion/so-called-latino-vote-is-32-million-americans-with-diverse-political-opinions-and-national-origins
[28]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/17/voto-latino-interview-2020-election-429857
[29]https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article242690821.html
[30]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/10/robeson-county-rural-rainbow-coalition-north-carolina-trump-republicans-443978
[31]https://theconversation.com/which-us-presidents-actually-tried-to-benefit-native-americans-heres-what-history-says-80331

Social Programs to Combat Socialism
Social Programs to Combat Socialism

Former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson are regarded as being liberal and left-wing for their most well-known policies: the New Deal in FDR’s case and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty in Johnson’s case. One could definitely argue that both Presidents were Social Democrats in their use of State power to aid society’s disenfranchised. Many Democrats celebrate these policies as a reflection of their proposed values and evidence that reliance upon corporate charity to fix societal problems is a losing game.

Said initiatives were not done with a socialist society in mind, even if they had egalitarian principles. Roosevelt rejected the socialist label multiple times, even though he was opposed to laissez-faire capitalism.[32] Even before allying with them against the Nazis, the Soviet Union’s authoritarian society and crackdown on democracy and criticism did not warm Roosevelt and many Americans to their vaunted values. He, and Louisianan Senator Huey Long[33] were cognizant of the fact that a population whose basic needs were denied would turn to alternatives and in turn be easy recruitment for radicalization. If one sees how socialist movements sprung up in the 20th century, there were many commonalities with Depression-era America: China, Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam were struggling agrarian countries under the thumb of neglectful, repressive governments and exploitative business interests. Communist revolutions were successful in no small part due to said revolutionaries being better able to deliver on social programs than the governments they overthrew, even if only for a time.

In Lyndon Johnson’s case, his Great Society was inspired by the New Deal,[34] a set of programs with the planned long-term goal of ending poverty and racial inequality in the United States. This egalitarian vision focused on allocation of federal funds, programs, and laws to create various social safety nets (and enforcement of Constitutional rights in the case of racial minorities) to provide basic living standards, education, and employment. In some cases this involved increased government control in various areas, although the long-term goals were never to nationalize all private industry or to do away with the capitalist economic model. On the contrary, the Johnson Administration was very hawkish and anti-Communist at home and abroad. His policies of continuing the Vietnam War made him very unpopular, whereas in the USA he viewed anti-establishment leftists as a threat who in turn viewed his civil rights initiatives as not going far enough. Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO were FBI and CIA programs which sought to sabotage and undermine the Maoist Black Panthers, the liberal Students for a Democratic Society, and various other progressive groups operating in the US, with Operation CHAOS being specifically created at Johnson’s behest. Although both sides of the political spectrum were targeted, the FBI and CIA arrested, assassinated, and sabotaged left-wing groups far more than right-wing ones such as the KKK and White Citizens Council. This was in no small part due to J. Edgar Hoover having a personal vendetta against civil rights advocates.[35][36]

Although these are historical examples, the current Democratic establishment doesn’t fall far from the tree. They’re still quite anti-socialist, but unlike FDR and Johnson are more or less stripped of the need to attend to the basic needs of Americans in favor of big business. In regards to antifa and avowed American socialists, said groups were no big fans of the chosen front-runner candidates of 2020. Even more so when Biden suggested jailing anarchists[37] and suggested solving police brutality by giving law enforcement even more funds. He also suggested training police to shoot people in the legs; the region of the body with the largest arteries, stupidly enough.[38] While one could argue that by “anarchists” Biden meant the more typical term of “troublemaker,” the fact that many antifa protesters have far-left tendencies (anarchism included) does not paint him as a sympathizer of theirs by any generous stretch. When contrasted with his support of police institutions in the wake of the nationwide George Floyd protests, he’s giving the impression that he views state-sanctioned violence against disenfranchised groups as a lesser threat than the liberals and leftists rebelling to enact a more just system.

Sources Cited:
[32]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622
[33]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMUx4AQl5tI
[34]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
[35]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS
[36]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[37]https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4895925/user-clip-prosecute-anarchists
[38]https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/defund-the-police-joe-biden-cops/

The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain
The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain

Image taken from a Manhattan Republican club that invited the Proud Boys to attend.

When Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he did so at the expense of alienating the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party who tended to be single-issue voters on this. Barry Goldwater won the Bible Belt during his Presidential campaign and nowhere else. This was due to his stated willingness to preemptively launch nuclear missiles at Soviet territory if he became President, which scared the hell out of every other voting bloc. The Republican Party back then was mostly a group of laissez-faire capitalists and big businessmen who had trouble reaching the “common folk” with their policies. Additionally, their status as the hated Party of Lincoln meant that virtually no Republicans ran in the Jim Crow South: all elections there were Democrat vs Democrat.

The segregationist holdovers were left drying in the wind for a time, surviving as backwards third parties until Republicans swept them up via the Southern Strategy.[39] Via a series of coded messages now popularized as “dog whistle politics,” Presidential candidate Richard Nixon signaled his sympathies to racist fears and resentment of changing times. But by exploiting various facets of hot-button social issues (abortion, prayer in public school, women’s rights, etc) the Republicans made an alliance with white evangelicals also based out of the South. Previously a demographic who viewed politicians in general as sinful hypocrites, many evangelicals saw the legalization of abortion, the threatening losses of tax-exempt status for private Christian colleges that still maintained whites-only policies, the Equal Rights Amendment that would make it illegal for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sex, and pushback against the radical violence of the 60s and 70s served as fertile territory to bring in voters that felt abandoned by the liberal Democrats.[40] Reagan courted the evangelicals during his Presidential campaign, and ever since the Republican Party has been a cocktail blend of unrestrained capitalism, white racist resentment, and Christian fundamentalism.

Such an array of strange bedfellows proved antithetical to recruiting new blood over time. There are many non-Christians, people of color, and LGBT people who can be sympathetic to aspects of Republican Party platforms, both social and economic. To say nothing of other groups, such as voters feeling betrayed by the Iraq War’s false premise, those reliant upon Social Security and other programs Republicans wish to cut, and so on and so forth. However, the above trifecta frequently meant that said groups often remained outliers, and after Trump was elected president the bigoted elements of the party have been more open and emboldened. After Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election, a “GOP Autopsy Report” conducted by various experts researching their Party’s decline found the flight of centrist and otherwise conservative voters to be one factor among several.[41] With the majority of Republican Congress members backing Trump scandal after scandal and various alliances with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists,[42][43]political moderates and even many conservatives now saw a Party they wanted nothing to do with. There were reports that moderate Republicans have been gradually disappearing from the Party as far back as 1996,[44] and in the 2012 Presidential Campaign the “middle of the road” Jon Huntsman finished third, beaten by a write-in comedian Stephen Colbert in the otherwise conservative bastion of South Carolina. [45]

This has the obvious effect of filling the Democratic Party with more centrist and center-right elements, bringing the overall group away from the left while also pushing the Republican Party to the extreme right. Not just the members of Congress, but the rank and file, too. The supposed moderate Never Trump Republicans turned out to be politically negligible in terms of voter numbers.[46] A Gallup poll in late 2020 shown that 95% of Republicans approved of Trump’s actions while in office, at a time when people were dying from COVID in the hundreds of thousands.[47] A President who was recorded on tape saying to Bob Woodward that he sought to downplay the dangers of the disease, but would later go on to claim that it’s a hoax and then not that big of a deal.[48]

A 2020 YouGov poll with a nationwide sample of 1.5 thousand discovered that around half of Republicans would refuse a COVID vaccine if it was devloped.[49] A later YouGov poll with a similar sample size also found that roughly the same number of Republicans approved of violent rioters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.[50] Said insurrection was done based on the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump, in spite of his own Attorney General disagreeing,[51] his own personal lawyers not saying so when under oath in court,[52] and being caught on tape asking an election official in Georgia to “come up with” a highly specific number of votes to turn the state in his favor.[53] Around half of Republicans believe that the QAnon conspiracy theories are partly or mostly true.[54] Said conspiracy theory alleges that there’s a secret sex trafficking ring run by Satanist pedophiles who consume the adrenal glands of children to attain immortal status. And furthermore, that President Trump is waging a secret war against them.

When you have these people as your political opposition, just about anyone can look liberal and sane by comparison.

Sources Cited:
[39]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
[40]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
[41]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/
[42]https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=309264.0
[43]https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=306798.0
[44]https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disappearing-political-center-congress-and-the-incredible-shrinking-middle/
[45]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9011991/US-Election-2012-comedian-polls-ahead-of-Jon-Huntsman-in-South-Carolina-presidency-bid.html
[46]https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34576561/never-trump-republicans-lincoln-project-2020/
[47]https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
[48]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/09/trump-coronavirus-deadly-downplayed-risk-410796
[49]https://today.yougov.com/topics/health/articles-reports/2020/07/17/americans-wont-get-vaccinated
[50]https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/06/US-capitol-trump-poll
[51]https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud-b1f1488796c9a98c4b1a9061a6c7f49d
[52]https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/
[53]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html
[54]https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/02/majority-of-republicans-believe-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-is-partly-or-mostly-true-survey-finds/?sh=12747d535231

In Conclusion
In Conclusion

The Democratic Party does have a code and ideology it adheres to, but it is not one that matches any of the popular leftist ideologies. They’re clearly neither anarchists or communists, for they have no plans to jettison the capitalist economy. Are they social democrats in the vein of Roosevelt’s New Deal? Clearly not, for they are notoriously unwilling to divert aid in repairing America’s vital infrastructure or put the brakes on environmentally-damaging big business like fracking and fossil fuel subsidies.[55][56] And especially not so if it would cause even a slight decrease in needless military spending. People like AOC and Sanders shout up a storm, but they’re just two figures in a 500+ person Congress. And what about hot-button social issues like race and gender? They’re supportive...to a point.

The closest definition of a Democratic Party ideology would be neoliberal, but with a neutered social democrat wing. The term is virtually unknown in the US proper, but globally speaking neoliberal refers to those who are in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, regardless or independent of social issues. The Republicans, by contrast, are a fascist party. They make appeals to and base policy off of racial resentment, claim to be small-government but are big government when it comes to human rights and the police state, they only tolerate the democratic process as a necessary evil rather than something worthy to uphold in and of itself, and entertain scientific falsehoods and conspiracy theories which result in real-world harm. The fact that neither party acknowledges these as their official ideologies muddies the waters further, causing people to look at them as Left vs Right or Big Government vs Small Government.

So what should we take from this? First off, the American political spectrum is not Left vs Right, but rather Centrist vs Far Right. Additionally, putting more Democrats in power is a great place to start, but a terrible place to end. Having the two parties as they are in the here and now enter into bipartisan unity and compromise will result in a center-right solution. A solution which is hardly ideal for the working class and disenfranchised.

I thank everyone who read this far. I’ve been working on this project for months and put a lot of effort into it.

Sources Cited:
[55]https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-polls-fracking/
[56]https://earther.gizmodo.com/democrats-quietly-cut-opposition-to-fossil-fuel-subsidi-1844768172

Lol, I ain't reading all that shit, mah dood!
And I already know why the Dems ain't really left, anyway.
TL:DR Lots of money corrupts lots of people a lot!

Fox Lokison · January 20, 2021, 10:25:05 PM

I would suggest actually reading it, as Skynet put a lot of effort into it.

Yukina · January 20, 2021, 11:00:36 PM

I just saw a video about this the other day actually. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99GErf-nBI

Chulanowa · January 21, 2021, 12:08:13 AM

Skynet, thanks for this. I for one have been getting a little frustrated with the assumption that Democrats are "the left" and actually mildly offended

To define leftism, it helps to provide a definition of its counterpart, liberalism. This is especially the case in the US where "liberalism" has been weirdly exclusively secluded to the Democratic Party... which isn't false, they ARE a liberal party. But so are the Republicans, the Libertarians, and for the most part the Greens.

Liberalism is a political ideology hailing from the 17th century and its heady mix of Protestantism, colonialism, and "enlightenment thinking." It has at its foundation, two principles; individual status and personal wealth. The ideologies within liberalism are defined by their approach to these principles, and how they manage the failure of them, but they all have these principles in common. There really is no "agenda" to liberalism beyond increasing personal wealth and status and maintaining the "status quo" which is believed to enable such gains.
This is contrasted to leftism, which is anti-capitalist and egalitarian. The divisions within leftism are not defined by their approach to anti-capitalism and egalitarianism (though such differences do exist) so much as the divisions are about how to achieve a classless, stateless society; leftism does have an agenda, something it wants to accomplish. So we have two ur-ideologies. One devoted to the pursuit of wealth and status with no further goals, and another, very activist ideology which is about abolishment of independent capital and social status. Obviously these ideologies are fundamentally in conflict.

And as it stands, beyond a very few examples in local politics such as Seattle's Kshama Sawant (who's a filthy Trot, but hey, take what we can get I guess

) there are no leftists in office in the US. None. Not Bernie Sanders. Definitely not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Possibly the closest to a leftist in the US government at the moment is Ilhan Omar... and even then she's still a liberal. Aside from these three and a few more Reform Liberals, the democratic party is mostly made of conservatives and neoliberals... which explains why the Democratic Party puts more time and effort into opposing reformist Democrats than opposing the republicans - who are themselves mostly neoliberals with a few conservatives and libertarians in there. Literally the "big fight" between Republican's and Democrats is just an argument over who gets the prestige of steering the ship into an iceberg.

Quote from: Skynet on January 20, 2021, 06:30:11 PM
It is often said internationally that the United States has a two-party system: a moderate/center-right party, and a far-right one. This is often in reference to how Canada and various European countries have healthcare and public transit being more or less completely nationalized, concepts that have yet to catch on in the United States. Even though two policies alone don’t make one left-wing, there is a hint of truth in that leftist movements and political parties domestic and abroad are not impressed by the Democratic Party’s principles. Even when looking at the Left-Right spectrum under an entirely US context, the group isn’t very left-wing on a lot of key issues or can do much better on the issues where they do happen to align with leftists.

Furthermore, there’s also a common claim that the Democratic Party as a whole are socialists or socialist-friendly. While the party does have two self-defined socialist members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they're outliers of a tiny progressive wing that the rest of the party and their financial backers do not necessarily want. Although there are anarchists and communists who do vote Democrat, it’s often out of a ‘lesser of two evils’ when contrasted against the Republicans, and said voters’ more radical goals (workplace democracy, end all foreign militarism, etc) are not given much weight by the Party establishment when it comes to policy. Compare this in contrast with Republicans, whose more extreme elements are given weight and credence by the leadership, which I cover in-depth in “The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain” section.

I realize that this is a rather large post, so I put the major sections into spoiler blocks. Sources will be cited within the relevant blocks and not at the end of the post proper, for ease of reference and scrolling if nothing else. I did my best to use credible sources for this. Some are locked behind paywalls. In that case, open up the links in incognito windows in order to view them.

A Brief Overview of Leftism
A Brief Overview of Leftism

Leftism as a broad term supports social equality and egalitarianism as ideals, in both economic and non-economic issues. In modern times socialism is the predominant leftist ideology, encompassing all manner of anarchists, communists, and more than a few social democrats. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it evolved from general anti-monarchism to an increased emphasis on anti-capitalism when robber barons and global industry replaced aristocracies as the major world powers. Socialism became the most popular brand of leftism since, with more specialized concepts (Trade Unionism, Feminism, Environmentalism, etc) championed on their own or as part of the broader label.

Without going into too much detail, socialism posits public ownership of the means of production, which means that every major economic industry (but not personal items such as clothes and toothbrushes) would ideally be collectively managed by the populace via majority vote as a primary means of dispute resolution. Communists and anarchists both wanted to replace capitalism with a classless, moneyless, and nationless society, but disagreed as to the means to reach this goal. Communists believed that the transition to such a utopia would take time, and that adopting the hierarchical tools of the State to help lead the people down this road was a necessary evil. Anarchists disagreed, believing that such power would corrupt even with the best of intentions and would rather demolish the State as soon as possible. The Communists won out on the world stage in the 20th century, and Marxist-Leninism (a sub-ideology created by Josef Stalin) asserted that a centrally-planned economy replacing private industry and dictating economic policies was the best way moving forward. In theory under this model, the State would voluntarily disband once capitalism was well and truly gone. Most other Eastern Bloc nations and Soviet client states followed suit in its adoption, reliant upon the empire’s funding and weapons in the fight against the West.

As of today, the most popular self-defined Communist ideology is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. After the mass deaths and chaos caused by Chairman Mao during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, there were many whose faith in the Chinese Communist Party was greatly shaken. More moderate elements led by the country’s leader Deng Xiaoping sought to adapt elements of private property and capitalism during a series of market reforms in the late 70s. Relying upon quotes by Marx and Engels who asserted that true Communism had to evolve out of capitalist societies, Xiaoping’s adherents asserted that China must first become capitalist as a stepping stone in the road towards a nationless, classless, and moneyless society.

You know all those jokes about how China is actually capitalism on steroids, what with their excessive use of child labor, suicide nets in factories, letting billionaries join their Communist Party, and the outlawing of labor unions? That’s not a bug, but a feature in their system. It certainly puts them in contradiction to just about every other Communist ideology out there, but due to sheer numbers (the Chinese Communist Party has around 90 million members) they more or less set the definition for what many people define as Communism in East Asia. Much like how the Catholic Church sets the definition for Christianity in most of Latin America, regardless of what other denominations may or may not teach.

Social Democracy (not to be confused with Democratic Socialism) came about in the 20th century, partly out of a rejection of Soviet authoritarianism and seeking reformation first rather than violent revolution as a means of dealing with inequalities under capitalism. Generally speaking, social democrats adopt policies of “here and now” harm reduction, whether or not they seek a post-capitalist world. Nationalism of certain industries for the public good, collective bargaining, and other mixed-market economy solutions are preferred. Some may support this as an end goal for a theoretical post-capitalist society, while others view a progressive welfare state with regulated private ownership of industry as a viable end in and of itself.

In the interests of disclosure, I myself am a Social Democrat; or rather I feel that said ideology is the closest to my values. With that out of the way, I’ll demonstrate below why in many key areas the Democratic Party’s mainstream aren’t even good Social Democrats, much less Socialists.

Corporate SuperPACs, or The Billionaire as a Single-Issue Voter
Corporate SuperPACs, or The Billionaire As a Single-Issue Voter

Back in 2012, a pair of bills known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) caused lots of controversy. In theory they were meant to combat online piracy and safeguard creator rights, but in practice were ineffective at their stated goals while also allowing exemptions for multinational corporations who profited off of stolen content. Protests against these Acts were widespread online, but the major cable news networks didn’t cover these controversies.[1] Not even the vaunted MSNBC and CNN news stations, who are regarded as the “left-leaning” orgs of the big five networks, did so at the time.

This was intentional. Major news sites and aggregates are owned by larger corporations, and corporations by design encourage maximum profit to shareholders. Everything else, including regulations, quality control, and even laws against profiting off of slave labor,[2] are a secondary concern until said issues hit their bottom line. While Republicans are better known as the party of the rich and big business, Democrats are just as beholden to their support. In this election and the past, the Democratic Party establishment heavily supported Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, who are more notably right-leaning than the Sanders and Warren types. The Democratic Party even went as far as to sabotage Sanders’ campaign, as revealed by confidential email exchanges.[3]

Biden, in speaking to his SuperPAC donors and Wall Street tycoons, mollified their worries of “demonizing the rich” by promising them that economically nothing would change.[4] He promised this at a time when we’re in a huge recession, over 100 million Americans are struggling with medical bills, debt, and one paycheck away from economic ruin. Clinton said that Sanders’ attempts to hold white-collar crime accountable would not end racism, in spite of the fact that the very banks she used in her analogy have a long history of contributing to systemic racism and other injustices.[5] Once the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was out of the race for good, hundreds of millions of corporate dollars flooded into Joe Biden’s donation box.[6][7]

While there’s a diversity of ideological views at the personal level for CEOs, in practical terms they always favor laissez-faire capitalism and support candidates promising this, even if they disagree on 99% of other issues. The Koch Brothers are a great example, for they are significant patrons for the Republican Party. Although they define themselves as “small-government Libertarians” in favor of LGBT rights and worry about the rising of a police state, this has not prevented them from donating to President George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns and various other Congressman who championed his values. A President and Party responsible for the PATRIOT Act, one of the most Big Government Acts passed in our generation.[8][9] The bottom line is that while the world’s richest people may align on a personal level with leftist causes, such sympathies play second fiddle to whoever promises them the lowest taxes and least regulation.

Sources Cited:
[1]https://mashable.com/2012/01/11/sopa-news/
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01/nestle-slavery-thailand-fighting-child-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sanders-clinton.html
[4]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/biden-tells-elite-donors-he-doesn-t-want-to-demonize-the-rich
[5]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-line-that-may-have-won-hillary-clinton-the-nomination-40504/
[6]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/25/hours-after-entering-2020-race-biden-attend-big-money-fundraiser-hosted-comcast-blue
[7]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/16/biden-committees-raise-nearly-100-million-as-spielberg-james-murdoch-others-donate.html
[8]https://www.cnn.com/2014/12/14/politics/david-koch-gay-rights-abortion-democrats/index.html
[9]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-164403/

Privatized Healthcare
Privatized Healthcare

Healthcare in the United States is far more expensive than in other industrialized countries, but isn’t necessarily the highest-quality in comparison to Canada, Norway, and other societies with functional social safety nets. Health insurance is completely privatized, and in many cases certain people and illnesses are not profitable to treat. There’s little protection against the alteration of prices for life-saving medicine such as insulin,[10] and common drugs are sold at a far, far greater cost than the price used to make them.[11] The practice of “surprise medical bills” which can charge patients five and six figure sums for treatment they never consented to is completely legal. Even worse, a bill created to end this exploitative practice was opposed by both Richard Neal and Kevin Brady, a respective Democrat and Republican on the House and Ways Committee. They put out their own proposal which ensured that the deal ended up dead in the water. Private equity groups spent 30 million dollars on ad campaigns to keep this practice, and one of those groups is alleged to have donated 30 thousand dollars to Richard Neal.[12]

It’s not just a few bad apples. In spite of overwhelming support from the party’s base, the 2020 DNC platform refused to put Medicare for All as a supported issue, along with decriminalizing marijuana.[13] The Democrat’s current Presidential candidate had nothing but venom for such a proposal, invoking the name of his dead son as an argument against universal healthcare.[14]

Sources Cited:
[10]https://www.businessinsider.com/insulin-price-increased-last-decade-chart-2019-9
[11]https://www.propublica.org/article/horizon-pharma-vimovo-common-medication-455-million-specialty-pill
[12]https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2020/why-congress-cant-stop-surprise-medical-bills/
[13]https://www.salon.com/2020/07/28/dnc-platform-committee-votes-to-reject-medicare-for-all-despite-overwhelming-support-from-voters/
[14]https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5d7y/joe-biden-medicare-for-all-would-be-an-insult-to-my-dead-son

The Military-Industrial Complex
The Military-Industrial Complex

It’s easy to assume that in the two-party system, the Democrats are the dovish party and the Republicans the war hawks. This is true, but only by comparison. There’s also the fact that in recent times the disastrous Iraq War is quite rightly blamed on the Bush Administration, which is fresh in the minds of many Americans. But that does not necessarily mean that the Democratic Party wishes for peacetime. Back in the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, where the privatization of war turned the vital industry of defense into a profit-making one. Although the US military branches are nationalized and under control of the executive branch, the people who build the supplies necessary for their function are private companies. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other such corporations consist of shareholders and CEOs who are not accountable to American voters, but rather the bottom line of their respective companies. And said companies also donate to Democratic candidates as well as Republicans, which in turn informs their policies.

During the Trump Administration, Democrats and Republicans alike blocked attempts at withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.[15] Later that same month, 37 Democrats in the Senate aligned with the GOP to defy an amendment proposed that would cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. The money cut from this was intended to be diverted towards domestic affairs, ranging from education, healthcare, and housing, all of which are in serious need of overhaul. And what’s worse, the money the Pentagon was supposed to use for COVID-19 relief funds went to make more guns and body armor.[16][17][18]

Beyond Congress, what of the party’s recent Presidents and Presidential candidates? Biden wants to further increase military spending.[19] Obama was justly slammed for the disgusting amount of drone strikes which killed far more civilians than actual terrorists.[20] Back in 2014, Hillary defended the Israeli military’s bombing of Gaza, a series of revenge killings that left 33% of the Palestinians in the enclosed city homeless and did mostly civilian casualties as a response to Hamas killing three Israeli teenagers. Sanders was the only Presidential candidate to call this out as unjust, as it is (quite rightly) collective punishment.[21] Support of the Israeli government, even when under extremely right-wing administrations like that of Netanyahu, is mainstream within the Democratic Party, and we give billions of military aid to said country in excess of other nation-states, although recently it’s become harder and harder to justify said support from a liberal or leftist basis. One could quite rightly bring up how Hamas have committed terrorist actions against civilians and have regressive views on women and LGBT people. But the proper leftist response would be to fund neither side. In spite of being more progressive on gender and sexuality, the Israeli government is an ethnostate that isn’t very progressive on racial matters. Not just to the Palestinians, but to Ethiopian Jews who were forcibly sterilized in the 1980s,[22] or the Netanyahu Administration’s claim that its non-Jewish 20% population do not count as citizens.[23]

One could easily point out that to be Left doesn’t necessarily mean being dovish. This is true. However, the fact that the Democratic Party so highly prioritizes the needs and interest of defense contractors over the majority of American citizens puts a hole in that argument. As of this posting, COVID-19 has killed 400,000 Americans. Flint only got clean water last year after half a decade of inaction, our hospitals are at max capacity, and Capitol Hill didn’t even have metal detectors installed until after the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. We have money to spend for tanks and jets, but our Department of Veteran’s Affairs can hardly attend to the health and welfare of those who piloted such instruments of war. Revelations regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shown that the former was a war to secure oil for private corporations that even military brass knew about. As for Afghanistan, it was revealed in a leak of confidential documents highlighting how senior officials knowingly lied about the fact that the war had become unwinnable. Neither the corporate nor military sectors have acted in the best interests of American citizens and soldiers.[24][25]

Sources Cited:
[15]https://thehill.com/policy/defense/505568-house-panel-votes-to-constrain-afghan-drawdown-ask-for-assessment-on
[16]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/23/day-after-voting-down-10-pentagon-cut-37-senate-dems-join-gop-approve-740-billion
[17]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/22/covid-funds-pentagon/
[18]https://thehill.com/policy/defense/518099-40-groups-call-on-house-panel-to-investigate-pentagons-use-of-coronavirus
[19]https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/11/headlines/joe_biden_says_he_may_further_increase_military_spending_if_elected
[20]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/president-obamas-weak-defense-of-his-record-on-drone-strikes/511454/
[21]https://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/hillary-clinton-israel-gaza-109210
[22]https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-foribly-injected-african-immigrant-women-with-birth-control/?sh=4a0805fc67b8
[23]https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/netanyahu-israel-state-jewish-people-61592236
[24]https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html
[25]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

Shortcomings on Racial Solidarity
Shortcomings on Racial Solidarity

People of color in the United States tend to veer Democrat in the big scheme of things. This has been true for decades, although under Trump this has only increased. The veiled white supremacist elements that have previously tried and failed to get mainstream prominence in the GOP achieved this goal once their own got admitted to various government positions and received tacit support from our 45th President. When faced with such a binary system, choosing to vote Democrat is very much a means of survival for those who do not fit into the cishet white Christian demographic.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party often takes such support for granted. Although they have done their part to make appeals to African-Americans and Jews (albeit slowly for Black Lives Matter),[26] they haven’t caught up as much with other ethnicities. When it comes to Latinos, many liberals tend to view them as a monolithic bloc; said group comprises many races and nationalities who can have very different priorities as voters.[27] The Cuban-American community is very concerned about the Castro regime and traditionally vote Republican due to said party being perceived as the most anti-Communist. Puerto Ricans are US citizens by default due to their homeland’s Commonwealth status, so issues surrounding immigration are of little concern to them. A good example showcasing this is during the 2020 elections when most Cuban-Americans hewed towards Trump, but most Puerto Ricans hewed towards Biden. Trump failed the latter group when he said that their island wasn’t part of the US, and did nothing as its people were battered by hurricanes.

Many Democrats often assume that immigration is the largest and only issue that Latinos care about.[28] This is an important issue, but not the only one. Many Latinos prioritize affordable, quality healthcare, and also candidates who continue listening to them after winning the race. This last part is particularly bad, as Democrats have a poor track record of not turning out for them until the election is weeks aways. And only then do they deign to talk about their issues and not during the next 2-6 years of Congressional/Presidential terms. Similar stories come out of the Asian-American community. In spite of being the fastest-growing group of eligible voters, they feel that they aren’t being listened to by the Big Two parties, and voter outreach to said communities has been negligible.[29]

In taking certain minority groups for granted, this allowed certain Republican figures headway. Native Americans are only 0.5% of the population, and half of them live on reservations which are politically autonomous territories. This means that unless you are running on the local level or in Arizona (whose land is 1/4th Navajo Nation reservation and helped flip the state Blue in 2020), you don’t really need to appeal to indigenous people as a voting bloc. Being ignored for so long means that Native people can end up with very different views of political figures than the general public. The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina is a great example, for Trump was the first President in US history to promise them federal recognition as a tribe should he be re-elected in 2020.[30] For an older example, the much-villified Richard Nixon is remembered more warmly in indigenous communities. His policies increased funding for tribal governments, granted back ownership of seized sacred lands in record numbers, and sought to pass an attempted Act which would grant them increased self-management of affairs.[31] Even though both US Presidents appealed strongly to racist groups and enacted policies that harmed minorities, making promises to smaller communities who have so little can be enough to secure their loyalty.

It’s easy to look at voting data and conclude that people of color voting Democrat are having their needs attended and listened to by the party. But this sadly is not the case for many.

Sources Cited:
[26]https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dnc-black-lives-matter-memo_n_57c6f80de4b078581f1072ca
[27]https://www.univision.com/univision-news/opinion/so-called-latino-vote-is-32-million-americans-with-diverse-political-opinions-and-national-origins
[28]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/17/voto-latino-interview-2020-election-429857
[29]https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article242690821.html
[30]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/10/robeson-county-rural-rainbow-coalition-north-carolina-trump-republicans-443978
[31]https://theconversation.com/which-us-presidents-actually-tried-to-benefit-native-americans-heres-what-history-says-80331

Social Programs to Combat Socialism
Social Programs to Combat Socialism

Former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson are regarded as being liberal and left-wing for their most well-known policies: the New Deal in FDR’s case and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty in Johnson’s case. One could definitely argue that both Presidents were Social Democrats in their use of State power to aid society’s disenfranchised. Many Democrats celebrate these policies as a reflection of their proposed values and evidence that reliance upon corporate charity to fix societal problems is a losing game.

Said initiatives were not done with a socialist society in mind, even if they had egalitarian principles. Roosevelt rejected the socialist label multiple times, even though he was opposed to laissez-faire capitalism.[32] Even before allying with them against the Nazis, the Soviet Union’s authoritarian society and crackdown on democracy and criticism did not warm Roosevelt and many Americans to their vaunted values. He, and Louisianan Senator Huey Long[33] were cognizant of the fact that a population whose basic needs were denied would turn to alternatives and in turn be easy recruitment for radicalization. If one sees how socialist movements sprung up in the 20th century, there were many commonalities with Depression-era America: China, Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam were struggling agrarian countries under the thumb of neglectful, repressive governments and exploitative business interests. Communist revolutions were successful in no small part due to said revolutionaries being better able to deliver on social programs than the governments they overthrew, even if only for a time.

In Lyndon Johnson’s case, his Great Society was inspired by the New Deal,[34] a set of programs with the planned long-term goal of ending poverty and racial inequality in the United States. This egalitarian vision focused on allocation of federal funds, programs, and laws to create various social safety nets (and enforcement of Constitutional rights in the case of racial minorities) to provide basic living standards, education, and employment. In some cases this involved increased government control in various areas, although the long-term goals were never to nationalize all private industry or to do away with the capitalist economic model. On the contrary, the Johnson Administration was very hawkish and anti-Communist at home and abroad. His policies of continuing the Vietnam War made him very unpopular, whereas in the USA he viewed anti-establishment leftists as a threat who in turn viewed his civil rights initiatives as not going far enough. Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO were FBI and CIA programs which sought to sabotage and undermine the Maoist Black Panthers, the liberal Students for a Democratic Society, and various other progressive groups operating in the US, with Operation CHAOS being specifically created at Johnson’s behest. Although both sides of the political spectrum were targeted, the FBI and CIA arrested, assassinated, and sabotaged left-wing groups far more than right-wing ones such as the KKK and White Citizens Council. This was in no small part due to J. Edgar Hoover having a personal vendetta against civil rights advocates.[35][36]

Although these are historical examples, the current Democratic establishment doesn’t fall far from the tree. They’re still quite anti-socialist, but unlike FDR and Johnson are more or less stripped of the need to attend to the basic needs of Americans in favor of big business. In regards to antifa and avowed American socialists, said groups were no big fans of the chosen front-runner candidates of 2020. Even more so when Biden suggested jailing anarchists[37] and suggested solving police brutality by giving law enforcement even more funds. He also suggested training police to shoot people in the legs; the region of the body with the largest arteries, stupidly enough.[38] While one could argue that by “anarchists” Biden meant the more typical term of “troublemaker,” the fact that many antifa protesters have far-left tendencies (anarchism included) does not paint him as a sympathizer of theirs by any generous stretch. When contrasted with his support of police institutions in the wake of the nationwide George Floyd protests, he’s giving the impression that he views state-sanctioned violence against disenfranchised groups as a lesser threat than the liberals and leftists rebelling to enact a more just system.

Sources Cited:
[32]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622
[33]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMUx4AQl5tI
[34]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
[35]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS
[36]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[37]https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4895925/user-clip-prosecute-anarchists
[38]https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/defund-the-police-joe-biden-cops/

The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain
The GOP’s Moderate Brain Drain

Image taken from a Manhattan Republican club that invited the Proud Boys to attend.

When Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he did so at the expense of alienating the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party who tended to be single-issue voters on this. Barry Goldwater won the Bible Belt during his Presidential campaign and nowhere else. This was due to his stated willingness to preemptively launch nuclear missiles at Soviet territory if he became President, which scared the hell out of every other voting bloc. The Republican Party back then was mostly a group of laissez-faire capitalists and big businessmen who had trouble reaching the “common folk” with their policies. Additionally, their status as the hated Party of Lincoln meant that virtually no Republicans ran in the Jim Crow South: all elections there were Democrat vs Democrat.

The segregationist holdovers were left drying in the wind for a time, surviving as backwards third parties until Republicans swept them up via the Southern Strategy.[39] Via a series of coded messages now popularized as “dog whistle politics,” Presidential candidate Richard Nixon signaled his sympathies to racist fears and resentment of changing times. But by exploiting various facets of hot-button social issues (abortion, prayer in public school, women’s rights, etc) the Republicans made an alliance with white evangelicals also based out of the South. Previously a demographic who viewed politicians in general as sinful hypocrites, many evangelicals saw the legalization of abortion, the threatening losses of tax-exempt status for private Christian colleges that still maintained whites-only policies, the Equal Rights Amendment that would make it illegal for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sex, and pushback against the radical violence of the 60s and 70s served as fertile territory to bring in voters that felt abandoned by the liberal Democrats.[40] Reagan courted the evangelicals during his Presidential campaign, and ever since the Republican Party has been a cocktail blend of unrestrained capitalism, white racist resentment, and Christian fundamentalism.

Such an array of strange bedfellows proved antithetical to recruiting new blood over time. There are many non-Christians, people of color, and LGBT people who can be sympathetic to aspects of Republican Party platforms, both social and economic. To say nothing of other groups, such as voters feeling betrayed by the Iraq War’s false premise, those reliant upon Social Security and other programs Republicans wish to cut, and so on and so forth. However, the above trifecta frequently meant that said groups often remained outliers, and after Trump was elected president the bigoted elements of the party have been more open and emboldened. After Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election, a “GOP Autopsy Report” conducted by various experts researching their Party’s decline found the flight of centrist and otherwise conservative voters to be one factor among several.[41] With the majority of Republican Congress members backing Trump scandal after scandal and various alliances with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists,[42][43]political moderates and even many conservatives now saw a Party they wanted nothing to do with. There were reports that moderate Republicans have been gradually disappearing from the Party as far back as 1996,[44] and in the 2012 Presidential Campaign the “middle of the road” Jon Huntsman finished third, beaten by a write-in comedian Stephen Colbert in the otherwise conservative bastion of South Carolina. [45]

This has the obvious effect of filling the Democratic Party with more centrist and center-right elements, bringing the overall group away from the left while also pushing the Republican Party to the extreme right. Not just the members of Congress, but the rank and file, too. The supposed moderate Never Trump Republicans turned out to be politically negligible in terms of voter numbers.[46] A Gallup poll in late 2020 shown that 95% of Republicans approved of Trump’s actions while in office, at a time when people were dying from COVID in the hundreds of thousands.[47] A President who was recorded on tape saying to Bob Woodward that he sought to downplay the dangers of the disease, but would later go on to claim that it’s a hoax and then not that big of a deal.[48]

A 2020 YouGov poll with a nationwide sample of 1.5 thousand discovered that around half of Republicans would refuse a COVID vaccine if it was devloped.[49] A later YouGov poll with a similar sample size also found that roughly the same number of Republicans approved of violent rioters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.[50] Said insurrection was done based on the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump, in spite of his own Attorney General disagreeing,[51] his own personal lawyers not saying so when under oath in court,[52] and being caught on tape asking an election official in Georgia to “come up with” a highly specific number of votes to turn the state in his favor.[53] Around half of Republicans believe that the QAnon conspiracy theories are partly or mostly true.[54] Said conspiracy theory alleges that there’s a secret sex trafficking ring run by Satanist pedophiles who consume the adrenal glands of children to attain immortal status. And furthermore, that President Trump is waging a secret war against them.

When you have these people as your political opposition, just about anyone can look liberal and sane by comparison.

Sources Cited:
[39]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
[40]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
[41]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/
[42]https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=309264.0
[43]https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=306798.0
[44]https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disappearing-political-center-congress-and-the-incredible-shrinking-middle/
[45]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9011991/US-Election-2012-comedian-polls-ahead-of-Jon-Huntsman-in-South-Carolina-presidency-bid.html
[46]https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34576561/never-trump-republicans-lincoln-project-2020/
[47]https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
[48]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/09/trump-coronavirus-deadly-downplayed-risk-410796
[49]https://today.yougov.com/topics/health/articles-reports/2020/07/17/americans-wont-get-vaccinated
[50]https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/06/US-capitol-trump-poll
[51]https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud-b1f1488796c9a98c4b1a9061a6c7f49d
[52]https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/
[53]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html
[54]https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/02/majority-of-republicans-believe-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-is-partly-or-mostly-true-survey-finds/?sh=12747d535231

In Conclusion
In Conclusion

The Democratic Party does have a code and ideology it adheres to, but it is not one that matches any of the popular leftist ideologies. They’re clearly neither anarchists or communists, for they have no plans to jettison the capitalist economy. Are they social democrats in the vein of Roosevelt’s New Deal? Clearly not, for they are notoriously unwilling to divert aid in repairing America’s vital infrastructure or put the brakes on environmentally-damaging big business like fracking and fossil fuel subsidies.[55][56] And especially not so if it would cause even a slight decrease in needless military spending. People like AOC and Sanders shout up a storm, but they’re just two figures in a 500+ person Congress. And what about hot-button social issues like race and gender? They’re supportive...to a point.

The closest definition of a Democratic Party ideology would be neoliberal, but with a neutered social democrat wing. The term is virtually unknown in the US proper, but globally speaking neoliberal refers to those who are in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, regardless or independent of social issues. The Republicans, by contrast, are a fascist party. They make appeals to and base policy off of racial resentment, claim to be small-government but are big government when it comes to human rights and the police state, they only tolerate the democratic process as a necessary evil rather than something worthy to uphold in and of itself, and entertain scientific falsehoods and conspiracy theories which result in real-world harm. The fact that neither party acknowledges these as their official ideologies muddies the waters further, causing people to look at them as Left vs Right or Big Government vs Small Government.

So what should we take from this? First off, the American political spectrum is not Left vs Right, but rather Centrist vs Far Right. Additionally, putting more Democrats in power is a great place to start, but a terrible place to end. Having the two parties as they are in the here and now enter into bipartisan unity and compromise will result in a center-right solution. A solution which is hardly ideal for the working class and disenfranchised.

I thank everyone who read this far. I’ve been working on this project for months and put a lot of effort into it.

Sources Cited:
[55]https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-polls-fracking/
[56]https://earther.gizmodo.com/democrats-quietly-cut-opposition-to-fossil-fuel-subsidi-1844768172

stormwyrm · January 21, 2021, 12:09:26 AM

Bernie Sanders is considered in the United States a wild-eyed off the wall radical leftist, but when he's compared with politicians in other western democracies he comes off more as an only slightly left of centre social democrat of the sort that sometimes gets to run governments or be part of a respectable opposition. He is an outlier though, hardly typical of the Democratic Party in general, and there are only a few others of his sort, off the top of my head I can only think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Most of the Democratic Party, such as Biden, the Clintons, Obama, etc. are only very slightly to the left of the Republicans, only a smidge less authoritarian and every bit in thrall to corporate monied interests. The Democratic Party is just the good cop to the Republicans' bad cop.

TheGlyphstone · January 21, 2021, 12:25:47 AM

I've always understood the Democrats to be 'left' only as a relative measure against their far-right Republican counterparts, but it's interesting to see it explained via detailed policy why they aren't left in an objective sense. Another thanks to Skynet for laying it all out clearly.

Chulanowa · January 21, 2021, 12:39:13 AM

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on January 21, 2021, 12:25:47 AM
I've always understood the Democrats to be 'left' only as a relative measure against their far-right Republican counterparts, but it's interesting to see it explained via detailed policy why they aren't left in an objective sense. Another thanks to Skynet for laying it all out clearly.

This is a thing known as the "overton window." basically hte only context the Democrats could ever be considered "left" is in a frame where only they and the Republican's exist; similarly the only time that the republicans alone appear extreme is under similar conditions. If we remove the frame of "acceptable discourse" to allow for the full scope of political ideology - or even just liberal political ideologies! - both the Democrats and Republicans become exposed as very far right political parties.

TheGlyphstone · January 21, 2021, 12:41:00 AM

Yeah, I'm familiar with the Overton Window, and how its shifted in various directions over time on different subjects.

Haibane · January 21, 2021, 08:19:00 AM

Quote from: joeman on January 20, 2021, 09:19:29 PM
Lol, I ain't reading all that shit, mah dood!

Which is part of the reason why politics is such a mess in several countries - people are too lazy to educate themselves on what the other side of the hill thinks and how it views the same world they do. A reaction like yours is a part of the problem.

RedRose · January 22, 2021, 11:28:12 AM

I'm often quite confused at American politics. My mom finally read Gone with the wind and told me, "but the democrats were pro slavery?" She was also surprised that Cali has many homeless people despite being liberal/democrat. I couldn't really help. In my country "the left" is in favor of social help for redistribution, but so is the right, for different reasons (I think mostly natality, and keeping women home. Le Pen is/was suggesting a home salary and while I'd never vote for them, I would love to be a paid housewife). Anyway, following.

stormwyrm · January 22, 2021, 12:42:42 PM

Quote from: RedRose on January 22, 2021, 11:28:12 AM
I'm often quite confused at American politics. My mom finally read Gone with the wind and told me, "but the democrats were pro slavery?"

Yes they were. It may help to remember that in the 19th century, the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, so that's what you see in Gone With The Wind. However, there was a massive realignment of the positions of the Republican and Democratic parties over the issues of civil rights and racism in the 1960s, thanks largely to Richard Nixon. Here's an article that kinda explains it:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Skynet · January 23, 2021, 05:24:18 PM

I've been holding off from responding because I wanted to let conversations flow naturally, but I'm happy to see my thread generating discussion. :)

Quote from: Yukina on January 20, 2021, 11:00:36 PM
I just saw a video about this the other day actually. :)

I have yet to watch said video, but Renegade Cut has made some good material. I'll be sure to watch it later.

Quote from: Chulanowa on January 21, 2021, 12:08:13 AM
Skynet, thanks for this. I for one have been getting a little frustrated with the assumption that Democrats are "the left" and actually mildly offended

To define leftism, it helps to provide a definition of its counterpart, liberalism. This is especially the case in the US where "liberalism" has been weirdly exclusively secluded to the Democratic Party... which isn't false, they ARE a liberal party. But so are the Republicans, the Libertarians, and for the most part the Greens.

Liberalism is a political ideology hailing from the 17th century and its heady mix of Protestantism, colonialism, and "enlightenment thinking." It has at its foundation, two principles; individual status and personal wealth. The ideologies within liberalism are defined by their approach to these principles, and how they manage the failure of them, but they all have these principles in common. There really is no "agenda" to liberalism beyond increasing personal wealth and status and maintaining the "status quo" which is believed to enable such gains.

This is contrasted to leftism, which is anti-capitalist and egalitarian. The divisions within leftism are not defined by their approach to anti-capitalism and egalitarianism (though such differences do exist) so much as the divisions are about how to achieve a classless, stateless society; leftism does have an agenda, something it wants to accomplish. So we have two ur-ideologies. One devoted to the pursuit of wealth and status with no further goals, and another, very activist ideology which is about abolishment of independent capital and social status. Obviously these ideologies are fundamentally in conflict.

And as it stands, beyond a very few examples in local politics such as Seattle's Kshama Sawant (who's a filthy Trot, but hey, take what we can get I guess ) there are no leftists in office in the US. None. Not Bernie Sanders. Definitely not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Possibly the closest to a leftist in the US government at the moment is Ilhan Omar... and even then she's still a liberal. Aside from these three and a few more Reform Liberals, the democratic party is mostly made of conservatives and neoliberals... which explains why the Democratic Party puts more time and effort into opposing reformist Democrats than opposing the republicans - who are themselves mostly neoliberals with a few conservatives and libertarians in there. Literally the "big fight" between Republican's and Democrats is just an argument over who gets the prestige of steering the ship into an iceberg.

I'm afraid that I'm not exactly fond of the Marxist definition of Liberal which is anyone who is okay with capitalism, or one that encompasses fascist Republicans like Trump being in the same ideological tent as Jimmy Carter and the Nordic Model. The broadest view of Liberalism can still encompass individual rights and liberty. If you call people like George W Bush and the Proud Boys liberals in the USA, people will either laugh you off or think that you're some far-right guy who goes "but Black Lives Matter/Antifa/the Democrats are the real fascists!"

Neoliberalism is a more specific kind that prioritizes capitalism first and foremost and independent of social issues, and includes people like Augusto Pinochet who wasn't a big civil rights guy to say the least. Thus why I used that definition for the Democrats.

But the Republicans, as they stand, I don't think can be said to be even neoliberal. Their donors certainly, but after hitching their entire 2020 platform to Trump, a man who wanted to break up various free trade agreements (NAFTA, KORUS, etc) and raise tariffs, fascism is a more distinct label for the predominant ideology within the party.

Quote from: stormwyrm on January 21, 2021, 12:09:26 AM
Bernie Sanders is considered in the United States a wild-eyed off the wall radical leftist, but when he's compared with politicians in other western democracies he comes off more as an only slightly left of centre social democrat of the sort that sometimes gets to run governments or be part of a respectable opposition. He is an outlier though, hardly typical of the Democratic Party in general, and there are only a few others of his sort, off the top of my head I can only think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Most of the Democratic Party, such as Biden, the Clintons, Obama, etc. are only very slightly to the left of the Republicans, only a smidge less authoritarian and every bit in thrall to corporate monied interests. The Democratic Party is just the good cop to the Republicans' bad cop.

Part of this may be that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, for all their policies, aren't calling for the system to be burned to the ground or that we need to transition to a stateless and moneyless existence. Even if that were possible, it's not going to happen in the immediate future, and doesn't really solve current problems in the here and now. There's also the fact that being part of Congress at all makes many in the far left view them as complicit in capitalism in the first place.

Quote from: RedRose on January 22, 2021, 11:28:12 AM
I'm often quite confused at American politics. My mom finally read Gone with the wind and told me, "but the democrats were pro slavery?" She was also surprised that Cali has many homeless people despite being liberal/democrat. I couldn't really help. In my country "the left" is in favor of social help for redistribution, but so is the right, for different reasons (I think mostly natality, and keeping women home. Le Pen is/was suggesting a home salary and while I'd never vote for them, I would love to be a paid housewife). Anyway, following.

Yeah, even in blue states a lot of public utilities aren't state-of-the-art. There's also the fact that many have a popular perception of homeless people as dangerous and self-destructive, not considering that a lot of them just happen to be normal people who just happened to be tossed out on the streets b/c they couldn't pay their medical bills.

Additionally, mental health is a large problem among the homeless community, and even if they got the funds to get back on their feet that doesn't necessarily guarantee a transition to a normal life. During the Reagan administration funds and aid to asylums nationwide were cut; many patients were mercilessly tossed out onto the streets and doctors could no longer afford to treat them. This caused a boom in the homeless population. While not the only cause, it made an existing problem a lot worse.

Chulanowa · January 23, 2021, 11:04:52 PM

Apologies for chopping this up so fine, but it's a lot to cover

Quote from: Skynet on January 23, 2021, 05:24:18 PMI'm afraid that I'm not exactly fond of the Marxist definition of Liberal which is anyone who is okay with capitalism or one that encompasses fascist Republicans like Trump being in the same ideological tent as Jimmy Carter and the Nordic Model.

Fond or not, that's what it is. It's how liberalism has defined itself for nearly four hundred years. And yes, it is a big tent that encompasses many internally divergent ideologies; but all pf those ideologies stem from liberalism's core foundations and assumptions. it it helps, consider the counterpart, leftism; Leftism encompasses some radically divergent ideas as well (I mean... Posadism exists) but they are still leftist ideologies. So too with all the differnet ideologies within liberalism.

Which is how you do, indeed, get Trump, Carter, and Social Democracy all within the same tent; using that analogy, Trump is the car full of clowns, Carter is an elephant standing on its head, and democratic socialism is chucking hot roasted peanuts into the stands; they're all doing different things but are part of the same circus.

QuoteThe broadest view of Liberalism can still encompass individual rights and liberty. If you call people like George W Bush and the Proud Boys liberals in the USA, people will either laugh you off or think that you're some far-right guy who goes "but Black Lives Matter/Antifa/the Democrats are the real fascists!"

The American "definition" of liberalism really just amounts to "whatever the Democrats are doing," and nothing greater. it's not useful in any regard, and adopting it only creates ignorance. So I'll stick with the actual definition and settle for havign ot explain what I mean to people who express confusion, I guess.

And of course liberalism can encompass individual rights and liberty. Individual status is, after all, one of its foundational principles! In fact liberalism often fetishizes individualism to the point of social pathology. I mean you'll notice just how many anti-vaxxer morons are people who would generally be considered "liberal" by the American standard, right? because "MUH INDUHVIJULL LIBERTYZ" take priority over the welfare of hte whole society.

QuoteNeoliberalism is a more specific kind that prioritizes capitalism first and foremost and independent of social issues, and includes people like Augusto Pinochet who wasn't a big civil rights guy to say the least. Thus why I used that definition for the Democrats.

Yes, neoliberalism is a specific ideology. But is still within the bounds of Liberalism. It is an ideology within the greater whole, just as Social Democracy, Progressivism, Christian Democracy, etc. all are. And you're not wrong to apply "neoliberal" to the Democrats; it is indeed the dominant ideology in the party (though not the most prevalent - that's conservativism)

QuoteBut the Republicans, as they stand, I don't think can be said to be even neoliberal. Their donors certainly, but after hitching their entire 2020 platform to Trump, a man who wanted to break up various free trade agreements (NAFTA, KORUS, etc) and raise tariffs, fascism is a more distinct label for the predominant ideology within the party.

Donald Trump is not a neoliberal, that's true. he's a National Socialist (Which is basically just social democracy, but with benefits and rights restricted to "The Nation" - usually a racial / ethnic group within the state). But the party as a whole is largely neoliberal.

"Fascism" is not a distinct ideology. I know Mussolini tried to claim it was - and in fact tried to claim it was even its own distinct ur-ideology... but that has more to do with Mussolini's narcissism than with the facts of fascism. Fascism not ideologically consistent, it has no standard ideological grounding. There is no fascist discourse, there is no examination of ideology and principles by fascists - even those wacky Posadits discuss political theory. Fascists don't. Because fascism... isn't really a political ideology. Fascism is simply reactionary, usually violent, anti-leftism. That's it. That's all it is.

Haibane · January 24, 2021, 07:33:02 AM

Quote from: Chulanowa on January 23, 2021, 11:04:52 PM
fascism... isn't really a political ideology. Fascism is simply reactionary, usually violent, anti-leftism. That's it. That's all it is.

Erm... what? That is such a wrong statement I am not sure what your intent is here. Almost every political ideal is anti-something. That is a principal foundation of politics and social culture. The Declaration of Independence was anti-dictatorship. That doesn't mean its nothing but, its just one of its principles. Fascism is anti-left simply because it is extreme right. There's a slew of other principles in there too whether it's Mussolini's recipe, Hitler's, or Trump's.

Vekseid · January 24, 2021, 08:20:09 AM

Quote from: Chulanowa on January 23, 2021, 11:04:52 PM
Fond or not, that's what it is. It's how liberalism has defined itself for nearly four hundred years.

When you state a falsehood, claiming 'like it or not' doesn't make it true. Claiming liberalism has been for the 'status quo' since the beginning is especially farcical. It saw to the collapse of mercantilism and monarchy, and the entire 'status quo' thing is old money and power trying to figure out how to maintain their influence in the new world to come.

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Which is how you do, indeed, get Trump, Carter, and Social Democracy all within the same tent; using that analogy, Trump is the car full of clowns, Carter is an elephant standing on its head, and democratic socialism is chucking hot roasted peanuts into the stands; they're all doing different things but are part of the same circus.

Trump's behavior over the last four years was not liberal. He was forced, by sheer weight of inertia, to follow liberal procedure, but he struggled against it at every turn. He started up nearly every trade war he was legally allowed to. A major component of his following believes he was divinely appointed to rule, and a major portion of his every move was designed to invoke outrage from 'the left', hurting 'the right people', and so on. His was not a government facilitating rule by consent of the governed. To him and his followers, your rights were your rights to follow his cult of personality.

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The American "definition" of liberalism really just amounts to "whatever the Democrats are doing," and nothing greater. it's not useful in any regard, and adopting it only creates ignorance. So I'll stick with the actual definition and settle for havign ot explain what I mean to people who express confusion, I guess.

Your own definition is pretty reductive.

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Donald Trump is not a neoliberal, that's true. he's a National Socialist (Which is basically just social democracy, but with benefits and rights restricted to "The Nation" - usually a racial / ethnic group within the state). But the party as a whole is largely neoliberal.

The interesting thing about that sort of callout is Trump also had a sort of 'manage economy by theft' thing going on, that was no doubt going to get a lot worse in response to COVID. He also relied on a lot of populist rhetoric.

I think about a third of the party is going to hop ship and join him when he makes his new party.

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"Fascism" is not a distinct ideology. I know Mussolini tried to claim it was - and in fact tried to claim it was even its own distinct ur-ideology... but that has more to do with Mussolini's narcissism than with the facts of fascism. Fascism not ideologically consistent, it has no standard ideological grounding. There is no fascist discourse, there is no examination of ideology and principles by fascists - even those wacky Posadits discuss political theory. Fascists don't. Because fascism... isn't really a political ideology. Fascism is simply reactionary, usually violent, anti-leftism. That's it. That's all it is.

Spoken like someone who hasn't taken a peek down the NRx hole.

Fascism is of course more a means to an end but the key point of that end is an end to several other ideologies. Liberalism was the enemy before communism was.

Then neoliberalism turned it into a tool to further its own ends.

Also, I find it interesting you at least attempt a proper definition of liberalism but slip into a niche definition of 'reactionary'.

Fox Lokison · January 24, 2021, 08:53:48 AM

Quote from: Chulanowa on January 23, 2021, 11:04:52 PM
"Fascism" is not a distinct ideology. I know Mussolini tried to claim it was - and in fact tried to claim it was even its own distinct ur-ideology... but that has more to do with Mussolini's narcissism than with the facts of fascism. Fascism not ideologically consistent, it has no standard ideological grounding. There is no fascist discourse, there is no examination of ideology and principles by fascists - even those wacky Posadits discuss political theory. Fascists don't. Because fascism... isn't really a political ideology. Fascism is simply reactionary, usually violent, anti-leftism. That's it. That's all it is.

While you're correct in saying fascism is not ideologically consistent, that's not exactly for the reasons you're claiming, nor is it because it's not a political ideology. Yes, fascism is reactionary, yes, it is violent, yes, it is anti-leftist, but you've left out critical nuances in this.

Fascism is;

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
Supremacy of the Military
Rampant Sexism
Controlled Mass Media
Obsession with National Security
Religion and Government are Intertwined
Corporate Power is Protected
Labor Power is Suppressed
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fraudulent Elections

The reason fascism seems so idealogically inconsistent is because these things can be applied just about anywhere, if you were feeling froggy, and can be manifested in different ways. You have the occult, supernatural, "back to our roots"/"Blood and Soil" kind that the German Nazis used, which focused around a return to a former way of life, and a master race, as an example. Radically different from Italian fascism or American fascism. That's not because fascism itself is a reaction - it's because fascism is adaptive. As any good ultranationalist movement is. What's going to work in Italy isn't going to work in Germany or America.

To quote Susan Sontag; "Fascist aesthetics … flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, "virile" posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death."

It's entirely flexible. The point of it is to BE flexible. That's how it thrives. And to say fascist don't discuss political theory is... wild. Fascists absolutely discuss political theory. It simply comes second to the aesthetics and grand goal. Anything that gets them to where they want to be is acceptable. In that, they certainly seem indiscriminate, but they're really just opportunistic.

Fascism is a well-researched, well-understood response to societal upheaval and the shift from authoritarianism to democracy. It's not just some reaction, but a coherent ideology and form of government.

Fox Lokison · January 24, 2021, 09:14:51 AM

I'm splitting this up for reasons (aka I'm blind and walls of text hurt my eyeballs)

Quote from: Chulanowa on January 23, 2021, 11:04:52 PM
Fond or not, that's what it is. It's how liberalism has defined itself for nearly four hundred years. And yes, it is a big tent that encompasses many internally divergent ideologies; but all pf those ideologies stem from liberalism's core foundations and assumptions. it it helps, consider the counterpart, leftism; Leftism encompasses some radically divergent ideas as well (I mean... Posadism exists) but they are still leftist ideologies. So too with all the differnet ideologies within liberalism.

You're again, drastically oversimplifying the issue.

Liberalism has not, in fact, defined itself as "anyone who is okay with capitalism". By virtue of that, the majority of the world, including stringent authoritarian regimes that stand opposite to EVERYTHING liberalism stands for, are liberal. Your comparison falls flat, and ignores multiple nuances, in favor of a simplistic and borderline reductionist explanation. Not to mention how this conflates economic liberalism and social liberalism as the same thing, when in fact they're markedly different and can be separated - ie, being socially liberal but economically conservative.

QuoteLiberalism is a political ideology hailing from the 17th century and its heady mix of Protestantism, colonialism, and "enlightenment thinking." It has at its foundation, two principles; individual status and personal wealth. The ideologies within liberalism are defined by their approach to these principles, and how they manage the failure of them, but they all have these principles in common. There really is no "agenda" to liberalism beyond increasing personal wealth and status and maintaining the "status quo" which is believed to enable such gains.

Again, just entirely reductionist. Nothing stays consistent for 400 years, least of all political ideology. This is somewhat equivalent to saying "the Democrats were pro-slavery back in the day" like it's some sort of coherent argument that they are now. I'm sorry, but that's entirely bunk. Things change. Things adapt. The liberalism of WWII is completely unrecognizable now. This is the issue with using an analysis from several hundred years ago. It doesn't apply.

If we're going to use the original definitions of something, then we sure as shit can't call what America - or most of the world - has, a democracy. We can't call ourselves republics. Nor confederacies, not ANY of the terms we commonly use, because we are entirely distinct from the original definitions. This is the issue with applying analysis from men in the 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s in modern day. The world is radically different. Analysis needs to adapt.

TheGlyphstone · January 24, 2021, 10:29:10 AM

Seeing this back-and-forth, I'm actually reminded of a comment I saw here some time ago - from ReijiTabbito, I think - about how the left's best skill is fighting amongst itself.

While it might not go over well with some in the thread, I have to wonder - whose purpose does it serve to build hard gates past which you must be This Left to pass, and anyone insufficiently Left is one of Them? Skynet's spoiler-box on the GOP's Moderate Brain Drain touched on this, but the right-wing's answer to divergent or more moderate ideologies is to expel them, creating a unified bloc from the remainder; they might be following different roadmaps but they march to the beat of one drum. Does playing No True ~~Scotsman~~ Leftist/Liberal/Progressive/Etc. serve a productive purpose towards realizing anyone's goals?

Skynet · January 24, 2021, 04:42:53 PM

QuoteFond or not, that's what it is. It's how liberalism has defined itself for nearly four hundred years. And yes, it is a big tent that encompasses many internally divergent ideologies; but all pf those ideologies stem from liberalism's core foundations and assumptions. it it helps, consider the counterpart, leftism; Leftism encompasses some radically divergent ideas as well (I mean... Posadism exists) but they are still leftist ideologies. So too with all the differnet ideologies within liberalism.

Which is how you do, indeed, get Trump, Carter, and Social Democracy all within the same tent; using that analogy, Trump is the car full of clowns, Carter is an elephant standing on its head, and democratic socialism is chucking hot roasted peanuts into the stands; they're all doing different things but are part of the same circus.

QuoteDonald Trump is not a neoliberal, that's true. he's a National Socialist (Which is basically just social democracy, but with benefits and rights restricted to "The Nation" - usually a racial / ethnic group within the state). But the party as a whole is largely neoliberal.

I gotta say, if your definition of liberalism is one where the Nazis are liberals, I don't think even most Europeans will agree with you on that. Then again, I can't speak for such a broad swathe of people, but in my limited understanding the things associated with liberalism on the other side of the Atlantic (individualism, deregulation of business across the board, etc) were things the Nazis were explicitly against.

For what it's worth, in looking up the European definition of liberalism, I found various articles. Granted most of them look at it from a British perspective, although that may be the nature of English-speaking resources.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-10658070
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~jmaclean/es.liberal.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/6bf37o/what_do_the_terms_liberal_and_conservative_mean/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/30/liberals-british-politics-proper-name

It definitely emphasizes strong individualism and is closer to what USians would call Libertarianism. Even so, it still wouldn't match up with what the Republican Party is under Trump.

I do recall some other thread (by Beorning perhaps?) in that the Polish definition of liberalism is more or less the same as America's: any socially progressive position.

Granted, I don't know if this is a subject best suited for a thread of its own, or if it's cognizant to the topic at hand (which is more specifically leftism, or lack thereof, among Democrats).

Skynet · January 24, 2021, 05:05:20 PM

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on January 24, 2021, 10:29:10 AM
Seeing this back-and-forth, I'm actually reminded of a comment I saw here some time ago - from ReijiTabbito, I think - about how the left's best skill is fighting amongst itself.

While it might not go over well with some in the thread, I have to wonder - whose purpose does it serve to build hard gates past which you must be This Left to pass, and anyone insufficiently Left is one of Them? Skynet's spoiler-box on the GOP's Moderate Brain Drain touched on this, but the right-wing's answer to divergent or more moderate ideologies is to expel them, creating a unified bloc from the remainder; they might be following different roadmaps but they march to the beat of one drum. Does playing No True ~~Scotsman~~ Leftist/Liberal/Progressive/Etc. serve a productive purpose towards realizing anyone's goals?

I know it's double-post, but best served as its own thing.

I don't think that infighting is particularly notable among leftists any more than rightists. The political right seems more unified if only due to strong authoritarianism and intimidation, and said unifying blocs only really came about from infighting and purges. The Soviet Union and China had a menagerie of ideologies competing for influence in their early years, but after the government cracked down on opposition did they unify under Marxist-Leninism or Maoism.

I think the problem is that a proper Leftist society is very hard to achieve. Sort of like trying to achieve a proper Christian society, it requires a constant vigilance in self-betterment. Don't give in to prejudice/sinful urges, take care of the poor and disenfranchised, ensure a fair allocation of resources/rich people are not allowed into Heaven (camel passing thru eye of the needle and all).

Contrast this to more right-wing ideologies, which can still be hard to achieve in some respects, but with the world as it is are easier to maintain. It's much easier to whip people up into fighting a foreign Other and cling close to traditional values that "have always been there," rather than transforming society into a new direction. When conservatives and fascists give in to negative emotions, act prejudiced, or engage in hoarding of resources, that doesn't really brush against their ideology, but sadly it's something that occurs in most societies. When leftists do it, it sticks out all the more and it becomes harder to justify, which thus ends up creating conflict. "Are we not meant to be above this?"

That being said, the goal of Left Unity may not necessarily be practical; politics being what they are, some amount of exclusion is necessary. TERFs used to be found among all facets of feminism, but over time their violent behavior towards transgender people to the point that they began aligning with fundamentalist Christians and alt-right figures more or less caused them to be expelled from most US feminist spaces.[1][2] Keeping them in would've dragged everyone right, and it was clear that their hatred of transgender people outweighed safeguarding the rest of the LGB community.

A similar thing happens with tankies, aka Communists who defend dictatorships such as North Korea and China. They hate Nazis, sure, but they too have bigoted elements. In justifying their defenses of said regimes, they also have to justify systemic oppression against minority groups harmed by the governments. Cuba put gays into camps,[3] the Soviet Union sterilized Roma without their consent,[4] and modern-day China refers to Uighur as "superstitious troublemakers." And not just that, welcoming tankies into your spaces can be very alienating to people whose countries were imperial vassal states of said societies. How can you say All Cops Are Bastards when you have nothing but praises to sing for the East German Stasi?[5]

Western leftist spaces for the most part have made the decision that discrimination on the basis of an uncontrollable aspect of one's identity is unacceptable, given how such things are rooted in systemic oppression that has been used to uphold the status quo. A commendable and consistently leftist virtue. But in doing so that means the more regressive varieties of leftists, and leftists unwilling to admit that their idols aren't perfect, will naturally conflict and will be shown the door.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJyB_g_Xp3k (29:30 mark talks specifically about alt-right connections)
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html
[3]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-11147157
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people_in_Czechoslovakia
[5]https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/cg63ho/three_arrows_going_over_badmouses_eastgermany/ This was during a livestream of a German historian (Three Arrows) critiquing a Marxist-Leninist's (BadMouse) attempted explanation of why East Germany was so poor. Sadly the video seems to be taken off YouTube, but it did exist.

TheGlyphstone · January 24, 2021, 05:28:09 PM

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my question then. I'm not objecting or even questioning the need to purge incompatible groups, but more the tendency I'm seeing, to draw a line in the sand and deny any sort of co-interest or co-operation with any group who aren't as committed to The Cause as they are. Even in this thread, what started as a simple laying out of the qualities that define 'left-wing' and narrowed the definition to require total adherence to the principles of communism/socialism. It's what seems to be the idea that if you aren't "Left" enough, you aren't "Left" at all, which means you are "Right" and thus one of the Enemy.

Basically, where does Left stop and Center begin? And why is it more important to define the reasons why another group is not One of Us, than it is to find the areas of mutual agreement and work to advance them in tandem?

Vekseid · January 24, 2021, 05:46:34 PM

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on January 24, 2021, 05:28:09 PM
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my question then. I'm not objecting or even questioning the need to purge incompatible groups, but more the tendency I'm seeing, to draw a line in the sand and deny any sort of co-interest or co-operation with any group who aren't as committed to The Cause as they are. Even in this thread, what started as a simple laying out of the qualities that define 'left-wing' and narrowed the definition to require total adherence to the principles of communism/socialism.

No it didn't. One person did. One person who's worldview is so locked that he uses niche semantics to express his views.

Now more than ever, it is important to recognize authoritarianism like this when you see it. Ideological purity is literally what authoritarianism is about.

It doesn't need to be considered representative.

Skynet · January 24, 2021, 05:57:16 PM

There's definitely a tendency, I agree. A lot of it is for various reasons, although I don't think it's any more common among the Left than it is among other ideological groups. It's more from the existential angst one sees in the West when leftists can't get much political power, whereas neoliberal and nationalist groups have more or less dominate the establishment. It makes any conflict among the losers look all the more well...petty and pointless.

That, and it can be easy to get a skewed perception from Extremely Online spaces. A lot of keyboard warriors who swore they'd never vote Biden were more or less voices shouting in the dark. Meanwhile a huge amount of grassroots support and turning out the vote for Democrats happened among various groups, including a majority of Sanders voters in the primary. Not necessarily because they believed that the Democrats would usher in socialism, but because their revolution would be harder to attain under fascism than neoliberalism. That, and a lot more marginalized and disenfranchised groups would have certainly died from another 4 years of Trump, and sometimes you have to prioritize your own survival.

QuoteBasically, where does Left stop and Center begin?

In broad terms there is, but politics and philosophy are complicated. What may have been radical 50 to 60 years ago is now just the norm. It's easy to point where the Left ends and Center begins from a broad bird's eye view. But down on the ground with more specific cases and countries, things get more complicated.

QuoteAnd why is it more important to define the reasons why another group is not One of Us, than it is to find the areas of mutual agreement and work to advance them in tandem?

That kind of goes back to the purging of incompatible groups, like you said. Anarchists and Communists already differ in big ways, and previous alliances between the two ended up with Communists stabbing them in the back. This naturally can cause anarchists to be paranoid of an inevitable betrayal. Some say that the enemy of the enemy is still my enemy, and it can be hard to blame them given a previous poor track record.

There are cases of leftists working with liberals due to harm reduction, to stop fascism, and such, but a lot of those stories don't make the news or make for spicy online drama. Thus the People's Front of Judea memes.

Haibane · January 24, 2021, 07:20:41 PM

Quote from: Skynet on January 24, 2021, 05:57:16 PM
Anarchists and Communists already differ in big ways, and previous alliances between the two ended up with Communists stabbing them in the back. This naturally can cause anarchists to be paranoid of an inevitable betrayal.

These comments reminded me of the Spanish Civil War in which Franco's extreme right Nationalists and Monarchists fought against extreme left Republicans and Anarchists. Hitler's forces sided with Franco and Stalin's with the Republicans but aimed to make Spain communist. It was a most awful and bitter war as civil wars often are but it seems to me that it was not so much the Nationalists who won as the Republicans who lost and that often from in-fighting among themselves. There was at one point in Barcelona a range of about 5 or 6 separately organised military forces from hard right Soviet-backed Communists through all shades of Socialism to Anarchists and all kinds of other -ists. At several points the various left-wing armed groups were fighting each other.

Franco's Nationalists had no such issues and is probably a major reason he won.

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