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Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone’s basic needs met.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So Democrats are now where Republicans were in the 1980s: friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum.
Still waiting on that basic need.
Biden built entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid, while ironically being against universal healthcare. Almost like his donors didn’t want it or something.
Dictatorships are dictatorships, regardless of the political ideology. Both sides did horrible things, like purging intellectuals and anyone seen as a potential threat, mass murder of entire social groups, maintaining informant networks to instil fear etc.
I think people who call Republicans and Democrats the same are just in love with their own need to rant. When they’re elderly they’ll walk around shouting at trees.
Meeting everyone’s basic needs isn’t even far left. This is how far the Overton window has shifted to the right. Meeting everyone’s basic needs is left-of-centre. Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
“Socialism is when the government does stuff, and communism is when the government does all the stuff. What is a mode of production?”
God I fucking hate how the capitalist authoritarian states of the last century managed to gaslight everyone into believing this shit.
I am responding according to the context of the original statement. Yeh, you could go even further left and have anarchy, but that would be utterly impractical in today’s world.
[screams in communist]
It’s from the USA perspective. People not dying of easily preventable diseases, or children not going hungry, are extreme left for them.
Many of us would disagree with that, but in aggregate we’ve just elected “burn this motherfucker down with us inside” instead of the alternative who was still way too far to the right for most of us here on Lemmy, so you are unfortunately correct.
If you proposed children not going hungry to some of my conservative relatives, even in a room of mixed company they would say out loud something like “why should I have to pay to feed the kids they can’t afford because they can’t close their legs or put down the crack pipe long enough to get a job?” (Racist dog whistle very much intentional)
Meeting everyone’s basic needs isn’t even far left.
When saying “Please stop bombing Palestinian children” is the most ultra-Tankie Iranian Revolutionary Guard propaganda printed in modern history, it does appear that public amenities are outside even the farthest fringes of left-wing ideology.
Far left would be state owned and controlled everything
I remember Elon Musk calling himself a socialist. And now that I’m looking at how he and Trump are running the country, I guess this does fit the above definition of Far-Left.
No, that’s authoritarian left as pure left is communal ownership. Market left would fit better and would use worker and consumer cooperatives and market syndicates rather than state ownership. I hate how Marxists convinced everyone they were the only form of socialism despite people like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon coming before him.
Noam Chomsky is Far-Left, and he advocated for a stateless society. But yeah the idea of liberty has definitely changed in
AmericaThe U.S.It’s because Marxists/Communists and Capitalists like to pretend Anarchism isn’t half of socialism because it hurts their arguments.
The far left and far right are both bad. If in doubt, look at any country which has gone down either path.
Lol that’s not the far left’s position get the fuck out of here. The first paragraph is describing center/center-left.
Then why anytime we try to do it here in America, we are called progressives, socialists, or communists?
It sure is progressive though. That’s such a weird word to use as a pejorative. I mean I can get the theory behind being against a big nanny state, but why call it an unambigously positive term then?
Because hyperbole sells.
I consider myself a Centrist simply because both sides can fuck right off. The Left can’t barely manage to do 3 things right before fumbling everything. The Right traded the former guise of fiscal responsibility for LARPing as Nazis. “Sides” are a false choice forced on voters to give two brands of dickbag a duopoly to their benefit.
Sadly in America meeting everyones basic needs is socialist and too close to Communism for our poor brain washed masses. Sadly the country culture is summarized in “fuck you i got mine” mentality and not community based.
What gets me is that socialism and communism are totally different things. They’re different means to a similar goal of an end.
wut?
Jesus Christ.
Far left in America just means tax dollars going towards actually helping the people.
Yeah sure, and what is far lefts position then?
Seize the means of production.
Fuck tradition.
Fuck economics.
Kill the people who resist or disagree, or sometimes also if you just feel like killing them. For the rest, strip away basic rights so that they won’t rise up to dismantle the system.
–
As someone pointed out, perhaps things are a bit different in America, but this is how I see far left generally from Europe.
That sounds like fascism.
The 4th point yes indeed. Hence the horseshoe theory. Fascists love tradition though and have not usually gone to seizing the means of production in a general way at least.
horseshoe theory is a centrist nonsense contrivance. It suggests that the left and right both end up taking the public to the same outcomes.
The original fascists of Italy went actually extra hard for Futurists (the avant garde movement in art and philosophy, whose main premise was “out with the old, in with the new guns and machines go brrrrrr”), who in turn celebrated Mussolini as a great leader. Nazis were good at incorporating traditionalist aesthetics to make their flair of violent modernism more palatable - it probably helped that industrialisation had developed much further in Germany than in Italy, having already done most of the work of dismantling traditional rural society and the structures it came with. And yeah, they didn’t seize the means of production directly, but it’s also not like German industrialists (who had significantly helped Hitler to power) really had much options in deciding what to produce and to whom, or what kind of opinions to publicly hold, once the Nazis really got their show going.
Really makes you think about the short-sightedness of the current American business elite propping up their own Fascists. I guess we’ll see who will be faster to eat who this time around
State-run communism as it has actually existed and fascism end up with very similar results, not the least because both believed in fast progress, dismantling traditional communities and value systems and everything being run by a strong man with an iron fist. The fascist dictator is supposedly a personification of the will of the “people” or “nation”, while the communist one is the same for the “proletariat” or, indeed, the “people”. The fact that both systems produce cleptocratic oligarchies that destroy lives of ordinary people is no accident.
This is also why the “extreme left” supposed by the OP is not extreme at all. Some just tend to confuse evend mild and moderate social democracy with genocidal communism, perhaps because their domestic political landscape is fucked up beyond recognition
It doesn’t help that the communists here usually deny the communist autocracies of the past as “not real communism, this time it’ll work bro trust me,” and when you press them on their beliefs you learn they find killing political dissidents not only acceptable, but they’re excited to line you up against the wall “the second they get a chance.”
And the milder, actually center leftists like you describe, deny the existence of Group A above outright instead of saying “yeah those guys are crazy, we’re not like them,” but then turn around and count the supposed nonexistent Group A as their compatriots against “the nazis.” (But when Group A’s genocide takes off guess who will quickly fail a purity test and be shot just after all the nazis and anarchists, yup, it’s Group B here.)
America’s left needs to realize that people like those represented by lemmy’s own tankie triad are real, are “left” not just “right playing dress up,” and are dangerous people to them as well and to normal people, not “just the nazis.” It reminds me of Trump not denouncing the KKK because they supported him, but you can disavow people who unironically support the Holodomor and want to do it again to their kulaks while also pushing for social policies that benefit the people.
yeah tankies are the real problem in america right now /s
All authoritarians are always a problem
You’re in the meme.
how is that a bad thing? Right wingers deserve it
Reduce or eliminate private ownership of capital.
Both sides are the same amirite?
Centrism doesn’t mean that you can’t choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can’t do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.
What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It’s a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn’t matter who.
The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can’t decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn’t automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.
The boss: steal most of the profit
The worker: hey stop stealing, i’m the one working
Idiotic centrists: hEy MayBe You CaN JusT LeT Him SteaL A LittLe BiT
You can advocate for wealth taxes, unions, and other welfare measures within a capitalist system. I’m from one of the most egalitarian countries in the world and we are capitalist too.
It’s funny because from my European perspective there’s no (visible) left in the USA. Democrats are centrist. Sanders could be social democrat. Otherwise I fully agree with you.
I think this has only happened because of manipulation of the masses.
The US political spectrum has shifted so far. What is right in the US is far right in the EU, and what is left in the EU is far left in the US.
I consider myself Centrist because I would rather eat 10 pounds of fried bugs than align myself with either absolute clown show of a party.
I’m a free agent, and the haters can’t stand that they can’t have me.
That doesn’t make you a centrist. Ya’ll seriously have lost your ability to see anything objectively it’s wild. The Democrats aren’t left wing except for a few people I could probably count on one hand but nearly the entire country, and its inability to pay attention even across its northern border, believes that the Democrats must be left wing since the Republicans are right wing.
You may very well not be a centrist, or maybe you are, but basing that on anything that suggests that the Democrats are left, and left to a point where they balance the extremism of the GOP, renders he whole thing worthless.
We’ve been screaming at the US for years to get a fuckin’ clue PLEASE just become moderately politically literate we are begging you.
I spent 4 years going into debt for a degree in political literacy. And then more for a related Master’s. I appreciate the frustration, but I can assure you I know exactly what I’m taking about.
Relative to the 1D spectrum of D to R in the US, I’m certainly in the middle ground, beyond the border of what falls enough into the D realm. From a global perspective, sure, the Dems are already a mess that overlaps the center some, but thats a fuzzy edge and not as fully held by the Dems as most moderately informed Europeans like to imply.
And yes, the lack of appropriate labels makes me more of a “Centrist” than anything else, but its barely an accurate term, as is using a 1D left/right binary to define anything can be. I’m against many types of government spending, which only a decade or two ago used to be such a quaint way to identify oneself politically, then everyone dropped the mask and it’s just a full-on Kleptocracy out there now. On a Nolan Chart, I’m squarely in the Centrist square. On a quadrant evaluation, I fall into the same zone as Thomas Jefferson and…Marianne Williamson, oddly enough.
Plus, Lemmy needs to hear opinions from outside the tankie echo chamber.
I’d love to hear about that “many types of government spending” because that’s kinda important here.
Any dipshit can barely pass classes and get a degree. I’ve worked with engineers who can’t even fucking count pillars in a picture and argue when you politely ask for a recount so you’re gunna need to do a lot more than leave incredibly important context up in the air while flapping around your basically worthless-until-proven-otherwise degree.
Trump went to a good school. He’s bad at everything he supposedly learned there. Many republicans have law degrees and some days you wonder if they’re even able to read a children’s book with any level of competency.
Reducing an individual to a single point on these charts is kinda a fool’s errand.
Far better to give yourself a series of points on stances you agree with and carve out a spread of your beliefs with an averaged point that represents you.
To say you are a centrist because your beliefs are purely in line with what society considers anodyne and ‘normal’ is far removed from a person that agrees with extreme positions on all sides of the compass.
This only makes sense if you insist on reducing complex multidimensional concepts to a single scalar value. Even intuitively it doesn’t make sense. You place yourself in the centre between two philosophies you disagree with? What?
It actually makes more sense when you don’t reduce it. Look up a Nolan Chart, or quadrant-based political stance diagram. I fall squarely into the center of the Nolan Chart.
You think that reducing to two dimensions is significantly different than reducing to one. I disagree.
Lol, a lot of political scientists disagree with you, too. I bet they’re all stupid, right?
Why do you think voting for a party aligns yourself with that party?
If two people want to attempt to unalive your mother with a 50% probability that they will succeed, and you have the chance to stop only one of them, reducing the chance to 25%. Does it mean that you align with whoever you do not choose?
Voting WITH a party is not the same thing as voting for a candidate that has openly identified as a member one party or the other because that is a barrier to entry or funding avenue for them.
I know it’s hard to accept, but the entire history of both parties hasn’t been “socialist utopia vs. Nazis.” For a century the Democrats didn’t eject all the Southern racists that declared they were Dems simply to be a counterpoint to Lincoln-to-MLK-era Republicans.
Even a cursory understanding of history should make anyone distrust all political parties forever.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Why not vote for Bernie then? Better than nothing. At least it may give a lot of people or the democrats faith that he could potentially win in the future.
I’m not saying that you need to give them your time, I’m just saying that voting for them doesn’t mean that you stand for what they believe. You can vote them and at the same time advocate for a different voting system.
Closed primaries. I never got a chance to vote for Bernie.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Like Bernie has said, it is the only realistic vehicle to carry someone like him into the White House. The way the US political system is structured your movement needs to take over an existing party instead of trying to establish its own new party from the ground up if it wants any hope of success.
Yes, that’s what “barrier to entry” meant in my comment. Happepend to Bernie, happened to a family member of mine at the county level.
Parties prevent YOU from being ABLE to vote for qualified candidates. That’s all they are for, to give unqualified rich or charismatic people a chance to sell the party to you. Nothing else.
Ugh, market socialism exists.
Not all socialism has planned economies. That’s communism. A specific subset of socialism.
Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on market economies. badumtssh
Right, but I see market socialism as an ideological compromise rather than inherent socialism. Im from scandinavia, and my country is a capitalist country with a strong welfare state.
You have “welfare capitalism” as they define it so that they get to still try to keep people tethered to capitalism. Capitalism is not just having money, it’s a system that prioritizes said money. Capitalism seeks to reduce regulation and separate the worker and owner class and basically by definition you don’t get to have a say if you don’t have money. Scandinavian countries are not finding a balance but are resisting capitalism while keeping its name and to make people not be afraid of not having it(for some fuckin’ reason people really want it I don’t get it).
If you have strong regulations, a government focused on taking care of people instead of relying on businesses to do it, and the people have fair power then you don’t have capitalism, just a system where private ownership exists but is not jerked-off at every turn like in the states. It was literally made up so the merchant class could keep all their money as monarchies were falling. It’s a not something you want to even associate with. Even the states hasn’t gone full capitalism because they know(knew) that it’s not a truly viable system.
I also want system with some level of private ownership, but I also don’t think private, for-profit power generation should be a thing and if a company under “capitalism” is too big to fail then at least a large part of it should be sold to the government, and at least have it’s executive board purged, not handed a bunch of money as they hold their employees’ jobs hostage.
Capitalism goes through different waves and has grown to accept government involvement insofar as to reduce market failures of which monopolies and externalities are some important ones. Unions are justified in capitalism by solving the market failure of asymmetric information.
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it’s more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff it’s communism.
Lately I’ve caught myself thinking differently. The left is progressive because they want to progress civil rights. The centerists are conservative because they just don’t want things to change. The right is regressive because they want to turn back the clock. Honestly I think we need to stop calling people on the right conservative and give them the new label regressives.
You have to see conservativism and “the conservatives” as separate things. One is a group that can hold many different views and another is a view point itself.
Conservatives want to go back to the days when mediocre white men were greatly rewarded just for being white.
As a mediocre white guy, I can confidently say that is today. Any white guy who is like “I never got any special treatment for being white” has gone though life and society with their eyes closed.
There’s still systematic racism with America. That being said, everyone’s quality of life other than the uber rich has gone down noticeably. That’s part of the reason populist lies from Trump work so well.
If americans could read, they would be very upset.
agnostic are agnostic because there is no foolproof evidence basis.
with politics you can clearly see how some stances have been done and their effects. and other instances you also have a basis even in the most unclear case
just had an issue with the negative connotation implied here talking about agnosistics :D
I think we can all agree that adding religious parallels to anything is a waste of everyones time.
this
Yeah since people cannot be expected to have full knowledge of the evidence, you have to recognize you can be agnostic about some issues. It’s virtuous to seek evidence and knowledge, and you should make choices based on the best information you have.
I’m not advocating for independents btw. I think you should clearly pick a party to vote for, but the two party system is a horrible system for people who are pluralistic in their views.
Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?
I’ll just take a pass on the far-anythings.
(Anyone who tries to paint this as pro Trump needs to reread it)
Winston Churchill
Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?
Flipping through my big book titled “Victims of Communism” and it says here that the German Nazis and Italian and Spanish Fascists were both Far-Left and Victims of the Far-Left. Also, I see hear that every unborn child out to the latest generation resulting from famines common to the 1930s through the 1960s is a Victim of Communism. Nothing in the fine print about lives saved through the universalization of health care, housing, groceries, and pensions, though. Neither can I find anything about the Peace Dividend reaped by the industrialized Soviet world following the end of WW2… weird.
Also, absolutely nothing in here about the Bengal Famine, its causes or the millions of tons of relief the USSR sent to end it. So strange. Michael Parenti, do you have anything to say about this?
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
-Michael Parenti Blackshirts and the reds
Getting everyone’s basic needs met is more of a centre-left ideology.
Many centre-right parties believe in things like public healthcare, because it has a net-benefit to the economy.Centrists don’t sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything. That’s a really poor strawman argument from someone who clearly doesn’t understand global politics.
I guess you’re confused with people in the U.S who think having views somewhere in-between those of democrats and republicans makes you a centrist.
That U.S-specific ‘centrism’ is really just right wing politics.Maybe we should stop with left, right and centrist all together.
It’s a stupid way of defining politics. If you ask a random person what being left means it can vary from anything between hugging a tree or wanting good health care.
By calling yourself “green” or “social” you are immediately putting a label on yourself and a lot of people won’t vote for you because they’re too dumb or lazy to actually read into what a party is about. I saw an article here on lemmy that pointed out some moron that voted for Trump in hopes he would save his farm, if he would have read into politics he would have known that Trump was the worst possible choice but here we are…
I’m from Europe and I see the same shit happening here. Call yourself green or left and people will scoff at you.
If there is anything the current “left” parties absolutely suck at its marketing. Call yourself the freedom party or whatever but stop using idiotic terminology that people can’t relate to. Almosr no one will vote for the “environment party”.
I hate the extremist conservative parties here but i have to give them credit for being able to market their party in such a way that people are literally voting on them AGAINST their own best interests.
If there is anything the current “left” parties absolutely suck at its marketing.
You mean to tell me endless purity tests and screaming “you’re a literal nazi” at everyone who disagrees slightly with your position aren’t effective tactics to change someone’s mind? No waaaaaaay.
The biggest party in the Netherlands is called the freedom party, their mainly anti-immigrant and against the freedom of religion and the freedom of education. Totally agree they’re great at marketing (though it’s more about being loud and talking about social problems than it is about having ideas of how to solve them). They’re considered to be far-right populist, their leader (Geert Wilders) is aligned with Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni. The left has lost their working class-base traditional base to them because of them being more relatable (and less high-brow) than the labour party, the socialists and the greens.
Wait… checks news how the fuck did that happen. I knew we had plenty of racists here but I didn’t realize the vote swung that way.
The word you’re looking for is pluralism.
Centrists don’t sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything.
I seriously don’t understand how fucking difficult this is to understand. It’s why I largely ignore political discussions on Reddit/Lemmy/all social media.
I don’t look at one person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is bad”, look at another person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is good!” and try to find a way where both are right.
Now do it with gazans
I don’t look at one person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is bad”, look at another person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is good!” and try to find a way where both are right.
This is literally what centrists all over the world (well, the parts that show up in English-language news anyway) think about Palestine, though.
And you missed the entire point. Centrism isn’t about trying to find a perfect middle ground to every individual subject.
Of course there will be centrists that support Israel carpet bombing everything. There are other centrists that don’t support them. There are some that will support them with conditions. I know someone who is broadly centrist who thinks Israel should be dissolved entirely.
It’s not a fucking hivemind.
It’s not a hive mind, but centrist parties almost invariably have pro-Israel/“it’s complicated” positions. There will always be individual variation, but the pattern is clear.
Centrists don’t sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything.
In practice, they just capitulate every time.
You are right, that centrists don’t actually sit as a 50/50 middle. But that means that “centrists” always actually side with fascists and the far right when forced to take a position. If you aren’t fully willing to confront capitalism, it means that you will side with fascism before even mild socialism.
Fascism is not the same as capitalism. For capitalism to work properly, it is required that market power is minimized and that companies cannot influence politics. The fact that they have been able to do so is not capitalism.
Milton Friedman – In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), he argues that government intervention should be minimal and that businesses should focus on profit rather than lobbying for special advantages. While he doesn’t explicitly state that capitalism requires private companies to stay out of politics, he warns against corporate influence leading to cronyism.
Adam Smith – In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he warns against “the merchants and manufacturers” using their influence to gain monopolies and special privileges, which distort free competition. He emphasizes that capitalism works best when businesses do not manipulate laws in their favor.
James Buchanan (Public Choice Theory) – Buchanan and other public choice theorists (like Gordon Tullock) argue that when businesses influence politics, they engage in rent-seeking, which distorts market efficiency. They emphasize that government should limit corporate lobbying to prevent economic inefficiencies.
Luigi Zingales – A more recent economist, Zingales argues in A Capitalism for the People (2012) that corporate political influence undermines free markets and leads to a system of “crony capitalism,” where economic power translates into political power.
Am I understanding you right that you are saying that all centrists will side with fascism over socialism? Because I have some news for you in that case.
Actually, it sounds like I have news for you if you don’t think that’s the case.
That’s your opinion, not a fact.
And the issue with that is you’re only seeing it as two sides and a fence-sitter.
Centrists form their own views and positions, independent of the parties on either side.There’s no forcing them to take a position, they already have one.
And when they have to vote for/against legislation changes, they’ll side with whichever option aligns most closely with their views.US pseudo-centrism is right wing though, which might be what you’re confusing real centrism with.
far left and center left are relative to your own position anyway
Some issues are not relative or negotiable. Rape, murder, war crimes, pedophilia, etc. If you want to be soft on that stuff then you lose my vote, period. Now and in the future. If that means we collectively burn this place to the ground, well if thats what it takes, thats what it takes-- lets get it over with.
They are relative to global politics which most Americans know nothing about, it seems.
Republicans have always been pretty hard right and as of the Trump administrations they are pretty much extreme right. Democrats seem to randomly oscillate between centre right and right.
Pro-Oligarchy vs Fascists, IMHO.
Party A… We want to kill 1.000.000 people
Party B … We want to kill 0 people.
Centrist… Lets just kill 500.000 people.
Sometimes there IS no centrist position
But Party B gets less than 1% of the vote.
Irrelevant. When its war crimes at stake you do the right thing anyway even when its hard or you know you will lose. We’re not exactly arguing over school vouchers here are we.
Look. I will vote Democrat against MAGA every single time, but “Vote for us because at least we aren’t killing people” isn’t the flex you think it is. That’s like someone bragging about never having been to prison and expecting others to be impressed by it.
Sorry, but “vote for us because at least we aren’t the other guys” has been the fallback message of Democrats for decades and that isn’t going to cut it any more. Right now there’s a real chance for the Democratic Party to change in to something better than it was, and I sincerely hope Democrats seize that opportunity instead of just expecting everyone to vote for them just because they happen to not be as awful as Republicans are.
The Democrats aren’t Party B here. At best, they’re the “centrists”.
Well it doesn’t matter now, because Trump won and those Palestinians are all as good as dead because from the MAGA point of view they’re squatting on prime real estate that can be used for the Trump Casino/Resort Gaza.
who’s party b?
the dems ARE killing people. It’s just that they aren’t americans so they don’t matter according to the genapos
the dems ARE killing people.
Oh pumpkin, you are so hilariously clueless. 😂 The Democrats aren’t even in power, and even if they were they wouldn’t have the spine to kill anyone.
Then again, I’m sure you also think Hillary Clinton is running a sex trafficking ring from a pizza shop basement and Bill Gates wants to 5G microchip everyone with vaccines, huh? 🤣
Americans are so far to the right that minimum wage, affordable housing, free schools and healthcare is considered “far left”. These are given and common sense in the rest of the world 🤣
All American major parties are considered extreme right from an EU point of view.
Did you know theres even a subminimum wage in America? 2.13$ an hour.
Gotta love our “Tipping culture”. The more this country is going down I’m reminded of Mr. Pink’s quote “I don’t tip because society says I have to. All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I’ll give them something a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it’s for the birds.”
It’s gotten to the point where the US needs a real change and yet the 1% really don’t want that change and would rather die on their hills. Which, imo, maybe they should while others watch?
But alas, who am I to judge the wealthy when I’m just a measly common worker.
In developed countries*
I’m not sure if the USA qualifies for that status
Even in developing countries, governments do their best to provide free services for those in dire poverty, especially those considered “poorest of the poor”.
The poorest of the poor cost society money but can never invest back into it. Bringing them to a level where they can pay taxes to invest in the services they are provided while also getting a better quality of life is such a basic concept that it’s just stupid that a modern society would oppose it!
The purpose of having extremely poor people is to act as a warning to everyone else; “Stay in line or you’ll end up like them!”
Good thing russia gained 50 oblasts, those magatards are getting their social programs once putin openly takes over us government.
Welfare policies are common even in developing countries. They simply don’t have the kind of capital accumulated by European welfare states because they don’t outsource their industrial manufacturing to poorer countries. Hence, the implementation is difficult and bureaucrats are often corrupt. Reagan won an election calling universal healthcare ‘communism’ and actually opposing something so obviously in favour of people – this would not have happened in most poor countries. At least in mine, people consistently vote in favour of better healthcare, public transport and free food regardless of ideology. Fear mongering about ‘commmunism’ has been tried in urban areas, where people have the luxury to care about something like that, and it backfired spectacularly. The phenomenon of voting against one’s self interests because gommunism and freedom seems to be a uniquely American thing.
Americans with their white or black bullshit
The more… favorable right wing points I’ve heard are more along the lines of “I’ve busted my ass for what little I have! How dare you ask me to pay to subsidize the lives of people who aren’t trying to work?”
Completly ignoring the fact that better welfare programs should help them to not have to work so damn hard for so little in the first place. Or the fact that the welfare cliff and other various systemic problems make it that much harder to get out of that pit no matter how hard you’re trying.
It’s not even quite “fuck you, I got mine” because so many of them barely “got theirs” as is, which makes them even more protective. The ones that do have, have latched on to this idea of the entirely self made man, which ignores all the public welfare systems they used on their journey. Like schools, or roads. You can hardly exist in modern America without using multiple tax funded public works/welfare things every day.
Then you add in the hard spun rhetoric that taxes they already don’t want being taken from them might be paying for things they personally disagree with and things get extra firey.
Meanwhile the richest people on earth have spent more money than is comprehendable on convincing people that going after rich peoples’ money will just make everything more expensive for the normal folk.
But that would imply that they were currently leaving potential profits on the table. They’re already charging absolutely as much as they can, and constantly trying to shift it higher. I’m sure they’d still fuck us on the way down, but we’re never going to fix things unless we find some way to adequately tax the rich.
The “barely got mine and defending it” thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school “sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier.”
When I wanted to get food stamps “sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications on a technicality.”
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn’t use it “not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry.”
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let’s face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn’t be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It’s all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It’s so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.
Like they weren’t completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don’t pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a ‘well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder’ mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.
I’ve been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I’m just hoping I’m not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I’ve spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that’d just make me middle class. I literally don’t have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.
