I’m not one for Overton windows but I agree with this from commenter Linnaeus in the last thread:
I have a hard time taking seriously the label “far left” that’s showing up on some of the liberal blogs these days. One doesn’t have to like what some folks on the left are saying, but the successive lowering of the bar as to what constitutes “far left” just helps to further entrench right-wing frames.
I read a lot of the blogs that are often described as “far left” — Atrios, Daily Kos, Firedoglake — and I rarely find policy proposals that I disagree with, let alone consider to be “far left” of my own. Granted, I consider myself to be a social democrat Democrat, not a neo-liberal Democrat. But I think many of you do too.
There’s plenty of room, at least for me, to disagree with many other liberal blogs’ ideas about political tactics. I support half-a-loaf legislation and I don’t think that optics and the bully pulpit are so important.
But I think it’s simply incorrect to refer to much of the liberal blogoshere as “far left”. It just plays into silly stereotypes. The other day some friends (whose politics are about like mine) referred to Paul Krugman as “far left”; when a mainstream, strongly pro-free-trade economist is described a “far left” just because he advocates for traditional Keynesian policies, there’s a problem.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
did we hurt your fee-fees? tough.
I reconsider when someone on the far left calls out the glenn for calling obama “hitler”. Talk about entrenching right wing frames.
kindness
Well DougJ….No soup for you!!!
MikeJ
I think the problem is of their own making. They try to frame Obama as center right and then proudly proclaim that they are seventeen notches to the left of him.
Meanwhile, Joe Twelvepack just knows Obama is a Dem, therefore liberal, so anybody who claims to be so much purer must be a bomb throwing radical.
DougJ
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
I already did that. I don’t think Greenwald is on the left at all, to be honest. He’s a civil libertarian first and foremost.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
For me, the biggest problem with this kind of terminology (which I employ all the time, per the right) is that it silently presumes an agreed-upon middle-of-the-road, from which these folks on the right and left get progressively “far.”
There seems to me (Colbert and Stewart aside) very little on which many of us are willing to say we agree, and hardly any evidence of an actual “middle-of-the-road.” Like the word “average,” the concept of “middle-of-the-road” often sounds useful but is ultimately fairly useless.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@DougJ: I don’t see you as part of the far left. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.
For example, while you openly reconsidered your prior support of Eric Massa, the far left spun conspiracy theories that he was railroaded by a nakid RAHM! over HCR.
DougJ
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Oh, okay.
General Stuck
I’m a decided unsocial independent that caucuses with the democrats and we sometimes get social, other times it’s like sword fights on the ethers.
The big blogs of the left are now commercial that deliver a product to disturbed customers, requiring large doses of melancholy and self induced floggings. And many of the smaller blogs of the left aspire to be a big blog. Policy preference has little to do with it anymore. Bristling leftists in shining armor and various liberal libertarian heroes taking it to the man is the chic these days. Common sense of purpose is currently flattened on the roadside of this stampede for relevance. Some of us will tend it’s withered corpse for a rising when all the bullshit stops falling from a losers sky.
In the meantime, Obama keeps a 46 percent approval, when Reagan had a 40 percent one at this stage. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but does so more often than not in politics.
Makewi
I think you’re all pretty far left actually.
Mnemosyne
“Far left” seems to refer more to tactics than beliefs when used in reference to those websites. I think a big part of the sneer is that a lot of people associate them with the puppet-wielding, Mumia t-shirt wearing protesters of the 1990s.
It is extremely frustrating to me that we seem to spend all of our time on “optics” and bully pulpits and looking back at coulda/woulda/shoulda instead of building on the successes we’ve already had. Want a public option in your preferred form? There is absolutely nothing in the ACA that prevents states from including one on their exchanges, so start bugging your state representatives to create one in time for 2014.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@DougJ:
Let’s face it, when you threaten to “primary” the only socialist in congress, Bernie Sanders, for voting for HCR, then you’re far left.
Zifnab
At a certain point, it’s a bit exhausting to fight over the whole right-left framework.
We’ve got pro-life Christian who believe in universal health care and a living wage. We’ve got glibertarian anti-tax zealots who happily rallied for gay marriage and pot legalization. We’ve got Ron Paul gold standard paleoconomists and worker’s party Marxist revolutionaries perfectly content to condemn Guantanamo Bay together while Richard Cohen and Bill Kristol throw steaming turds at them from the WaPo editorial page.
Frankly, I think the whole left-right scheme is a false dilemma. More and more it’s Corporatism versus Populism, with guys like Krugman and Obama and the rest of the mainstream Dem Party trying to hash out bargains between the two.
Some of you guys are so busy staring out their Overton Window, they seem to have missed what is going on outside the other three sides of the house. A certain degree of popular consensus is being flat-out ignored because it doesn’t fit neatly into the 70s era political scope.
Ash Can
Well, I am. I think the basic theory does a lot to explain what’s happened to American political perceptions over the past 40-50 years. The American Communist Party — which is my own idea of “far left” — used to be a mainstay on general election ballots, and no one lost their shit over it. A rather nasty, hawkish Republican president was the one who instituted the EPA, and no one batted an eye. Conventional wisdom once upon a time identified Ronald Reagan as an extremist. Nowadays there are plenty of people who call Barack Obama “far left” for no other reason than the fact he wanted to reform health care. It’s fucking insane. (I’ve had a chance to ask a couple of people who felt that way what they would consider, say, Bernie Sanders, any random European government, or Cuba, if Obama is “far left.” I never got a coherent answer.)
j low
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): Trying to figure out if your post makes any sense. It’s kind of like the Family Circus of blog comments. Is it funny? Is it stupid? /idk.
IM
There is no far left in the US. And there hasn’t been one since the times of Upton Sinclair or so.
Mnemosyne
@MikeJ:
Someone in one of the long threads below (sorry, too lazy to go look for it) said that part of the problem is that most people on the left can sift through the reports in the MSM to get to the facts, but they aren’t able to filter the propaganda out as easily, so the “Obama is a soshulist Mooslim” stuff gets stuck in their subconscious.
I think there’s something to that, because it happens all the time with racial issues where people literally don’t realize that they’ve bought into a stereotype because it shot straight to that part of their brain where the filter doesn’t work.
Aidan
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call Firedoglake far left.
MattR
@Mnemosyne: And speaking of racial steroetypes, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell when discussing the decision to postpone the Eagles game until tomorrow.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@j low: I love it. whining about being insulted in one breath and then insulting others in the next. A perfect example of the far left.
Paul W.
What about professional left?
DougJ
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
No, it doesn’t make you “far left”, it just makes you crazy. There’s a difference.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
I’ve been thinking about that lately myself, but I haven’t quite gotten it articulated in my mind yet. I do think that one of the things people were hoping for by nominating post-Vietnam Obama over Vietnam-era Clinton was that we could extricate ourselves from the politics of the 1960s and 1970s and come up with a new way to do things. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people on both sides who are still heavily invested in that way of looking at the world, and a whole bunch of them work for the media, which puts them in a position to squeeze the discourse back into those boxes of 30 and 40 years ago.
wmd
I think it’s past time to call Paul Krugman a Centrist Economist. And Dean Baker a Center-Left economist in contrast.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@IM: okay. what if we call them, the kinda far left. better?
NobodySpecial
You also have to remember the big secret a lot of people here don’t like to talk about, which is a direct result of where this blog used to lie on the left/right pole.
A lot of the bigger names here? They’re Conservadem, almost proudly so. They take pride in demonizing ‘far left’ stuff because they never believed in it in the first place. You’ll find them much more ok with civil liberties breaches, much more distrustful of ‘lefty’ policies and politicians, and they take actual pride in rejecting stuff they find ‘too liberal’ as they search for their endless Broderian Mean. They do a lot of the false ‘too far left/too far right are the same’ nonsense, too, because they’re searching for validation of their narrative.
Unfortunately for them, Cole’s headed straight for Hippieland from ZombieReaganland without much stopping time in between, and since it’s his playground, more and more ebil lefties are coming on in as he heads that way.
j low
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): I presume you are talking about the “collective borg breath” of the far left.
pragmatism
where is teh ombudsertarian when we need him???
Brick Oven Bill
Mike Kay says:
“I reconsider when someone on the far left calls out the glenn for calling obama “hitler”. Talk about entrenching right wing frames.”
This pisses me off to no end as well Mike. Obama is not Hitler. Not even close. I have just read a book on the Third Reich and I will summarize my learnings to hopefully benefit the audience on this subject:
1. Hitler had the military pledge an unconditional allegiance to him, the man. Obama is not Hitler because when Obama sought to establish a parallel civilian security force that would answer only to him, and not the Constitution, he utterly failed. People laughed at his proposal. The United States military still answers to a document, and not to a man.
2. Hitler was very popular in Germany before the wars began.
3. Hitler’s 1930s economy was very good.
4. Hitler liked and respected Germans.
5. Neo-liberals own Obama (those pesky Columbia records that Goldman Sachs and George Soros would have access to, you know, those frequent visitors to the White House). Neo-liberals fled Hitler.
6. Hitler was articulate without reading from a TV screen.
JPL
I use to read Firedoglake and then the Pumas came and Christy left. Reading the site no longer left me feeling enlightened. The same thing happened with KOS but over a longer period of time. I started reading KOS when the two Steve’s were there and no one has replaced them. It’s interesting that KOS has chosen different folks each year but no one really interested me. I still read Atrios and Booman but not all the time.
For me, it has nothing to do with the far left unless Puma’s and Hillary would have been better is considered far left.
I’m not sure your comparison is accurate.
EDIT…also,too…B..O…B is an idiot…
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
Yup, it’s all about predisposition to absorb any bullshit that feeds that predisposition. Even people fully capable of sorting it out, but just don’t want to. It is what’s behind the ruminating ad nauseum about things like the stimulus, or the PO, or whatever the zombie meme of the day is. These folks just don’t like Obama. Some didn’t from the beginning, others through pol party pressure went along with the tide, until a usable excuse to bail let them do it. Some cling to the perfect to justify their discontent, and all are impervious to reason or reality of their individual dislike of Obama. The why of it is sometimes a mystery, and other times not. But the longer it goes on, the more the truth will emerge.
AAA Bonds
@IM:
Correct.
Loneoak
@Ash Can:
The fundamental problem with Overton Windows is that while they may appear post facto explanatory, an analysis that is driven by optics and linguistic framing drives us to favor superficial gains over substantial policy gains. It also gives ever more power to the Village. Optics matter much more there than anywhere else.
Ronbo
When I hear the propaganda that Obama is a Liberal, I get the dry heaves. Your posting groupies who continue to push the idea that Obama’s capitulation to the right-wing is a form of triangulation, gives me the moist heaves. Please don’t move further right – things might get wet.
I don’t like that BJ continually pushes the theme that we need to move to the right. Haven’t we been moving that direction since the time of Carter? The center is somewhere between full privatization and full-blown communisism. A little bit of public-good might be OK. John and the Commentiers have lately been pushing the false theme that the USA is center right. Issue by issue, we actually look like communists. Thank God for a corporatized media that tells us communist programs like social security are rightly being targeted for dissolution.
There are a few posters on your site who doth protest too much. I think their quarter/post isn’t paying the bills.
MattR
@NobodySpecial: So what you are saying is that all the people who realized that the Republican party went batshit insane over the past ten years and no longer stood for what they believed in did not turn into liberal Democrats as a result of that realization? That sounds like crazy talk.
JPL
@General Stuck: I wasn’t succinct in my previous comment..the problem that I had with some sites is they bored me.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
anyways. Kos is dying. The blog that is.
Since Peak-Kos was reached, readership has tumbled 50% since 12/2008 and 24% since 12/2009.
I guess you can call that an “enthusiasm gap”.
DougJ
I don’t like Overton windows in general because they are too often an excuse for people to lie, as in “sure I don’t really believe we should do this crazy thing but if I say I do, then it moves the whole debate in my side’s direction”. I find that toxic and I want no part of it.
Maxwel
Wouldn’t todaqy’s teabaggers and other wingnuts consider Eisenhower far left?
NobodySpecial
@MattR: Heh.
Seriously, though, the problem is that they’ve got what they feel is a vested interest in keeping BJ ‘clean’ of such ‘nonsense’. As the BJ readership grows and by extension gets more lefty with Cole, they’re getting squeezed.
Gatsby
Oy veh! Anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is now a pinko-commie.
Cat Lady
What’s the essential difference between far left and far right? Both demand purity of belief and submission to authority. The ends always justify the means, and compromise is considered weakness. No thankya.
MikeMc
I don’t understand the unbridled adulation for Paul Krugman. I enjoy reading his articles, but have any of his ideas or theories been turned into policies and implemented? He says that the stimulus would have been better if it was bigger. That maybe true, but we’ll never know. It’s like conservatives who thought the stimulus package should be smaller or not needed all together. I think that would’ve been crazy, but we’ll never know. That’s the thing about economic theory – it’s easy to be right when you can’t be proved wrong.
Mnemosyne
@Ronbo:
You must be reading a different BJ than I am. What I see is people pointing out that our politics are in such bad shape that adopting a Republican healthcare plan from 15 years ago actually moves politics to the left.
When Republicans repudiate their own plan as “soshulism,” adopting that plan moves us back towards the left, not further to the right. The fact that it doesn’t move us as fast or as far to the left as you want doesn’t make it a move to the right — it’s just that the move remains something that’s to your right even though the movement is towards the left.
Zifnab
@Aidan:
When the blog is posted from an IT commune in Northern Minnesota, powered exclusively using biodegradable wind turbines and covered in soy-based diet recipes, then we can talk about how far left they are.
Move Firedoglake to Spain or Greece, and let me know how many actually join the respective Soci alist and Communist parties. Or tell me when they start picking up the banner for Ralph Nader. Otherwise, please reign in your hyperbole.
Loneoak
A lingering question for me is how to classify American leftists versus European leftists. I have quite a few lefty European friends and they would laugh at the notion that just about any of us are ‘far left’ (I’m in the humanities at one of the weirded Univ. of Californias). For them, leftists organize wildcat strikes, squat in abandoned buildings, throw things at cops, etc. Yet if you average out my policy preferences, I am far left in the US, basically a social democrat, but not an anarchist or communist. But, being an American, I am inherently more skeptical of centralized government and much more likely to define freedom in a negative sense than any of my European friends even though they actually lived in, or next door to, communist countries.
How do our different histories shape our current classifications? Anyone have some expertise on this?
General Stuck
@DougJ:
I agree. But the OW is a force of pol nature unto itself, imo, and simply happens from the inertia of our political discourse and acts of governance, whether someone mentions it’s name or not. And I think works better left unforced, or unmanaged, and subject to use as a pol vehicle for deceit.
Ranger 3
How about we just call them silly, arrogant and unrealistic? That’s what they are.
joe from Lowell
Calling these people “far left” flatters them. Such an appellation assumes that their tantrums are actually motivated by a meaningful, principled, original ideology and set of policies that isn’t shared by the people they take such joy in shitting upon.
You should have seen the grief the holier-than-though Heathers at Kos dumped on anyone who agreed with them on DADT but supported what turned out to be the successful strategy for its repeal.
NobodySpecial
@MikeMc: I think the reason Krugman is admired so is because prior to Krugman for the last, oh, 20 years or so, Keynesian economics was considered something a couple of notches below flatuence. The flogging of Friedman and the Chicago Boys took the example of Roosevelt’s Cabinet turning the Great Depression around and made it into something that you didn’t dare talk about openly. Krugman does, so he gets points he wouldn’t get espousing NAFTA 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Ronbo
@General Stuck: Could it be that the left doesn’t like Obama because he has maintained 98% of the Bush Agenda? Duh. I think he is a great guy, I’d love to trash his bb game. But please face reality – look at his actions. He moves right BEFORE he starts negotiations. You’d think he was the black Ronald Reagan (which he is). History will not be kind to his Hoover-istitic moves. He is still waiting for trickle-down to stimulate the Bush economy; or at least that appears to be his stance of tax-cuts for the ubber-rich.
To quote a truly great American, “the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadellos.”
Sloegin
Marxism is ‘far left’, soc-ialism is ‘left’ (the dictionary definitions you winger clowns, go read a book).
This place? Pure 1950s to 1970s Republicanism.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
The easiest way to solve this is for lefties to grow a thicker skin and for lefties to take their skirts off.
miningcityguy
This is the first time I posted on this site although I have been reading it for a number of years.I am posting now because I wanted to register my agreement with what Zifnab said. I also think that too much baggage is attached to the words “liberal’ and “conservative”
Mark
If you participate in capit_lism, you have no claim to being far left. Having a mortgage = a no-no. Barter is probably ok.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
.
.
DougJ, I do believe that’s your cue…
.
.
bobbo
Anyone who follows politics to the degree that they are actually reading Atrios and John Cole and Kos knows that these labels are b.s. Anyone who reads rightwing blogs is just being told what they already believe. But the vast, vast majority of folks aren’t paying any attention to this shit and don’t think any less of Paul Krugman because someone calls him “far left,” because if they’ve even heard of Paul Krugman, they think he’s the guy on “Quincy.”
NobodySpecial
@Mnemosyne: I think they’re trying to say that moving back to where Republicans were in the age of HWBush ain’t exactly a great victory in the age of 59 or so Senate seats. It certainly isn’t when the supposed best friends of the leftists balk at going any further left of Reagan than that.
joe from Lowell
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
No, it doesn’t. Actual far-left organizations – the CPUSA, the Socialist Workers Party, International ANSWER – frequently engage in electoral coalitions with center-left Democrats.
IM
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Even nowadays you should not just throw political terms around just because you have a Hamsher obsession.
JGabriel
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
So “far-left” means “stupid” now?
That reinforces DougJ’s point about playing into how conservatives want people to think of the left. When people threaten to “primary” Sanders, who doesn’t even run on the Democratic ticket, let’s not assign it some label on the left to right political spectrum, but merely call it what it is: idiotic.
.
pragmatism
@Mark:
chickens for mortgage type barter? that just may work……..
KG
@Mnemosyne: there is definitely something generational going on. I don’t think it’s so much about the media though, I think it’s about those in office, and too much of Congress is still in the old paradigm.
asiangrrlMN
I use far-left in the same way I use far-right. Many on the so-called far left employ the same tactics as those on the far-right and hold Obama in the same contempt (if not more so). It has nothing to do with policy (for me). It’s shorthand for the ideologically-pure on both sides.
Zifnab
@MikeMc:
While conservatives were screaming their heads off about run-away Zimbabwe style inflation, back in ’09, Krugman warned against deflation. Sure enough, the CPI was basically flat the following two years and inflation was virtually non-existent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1
While conservatives were crowing about the Bush economy back in ’06, Krugman was passionately warning about the coming housing market crash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html
I can only post two links per comment, but I could probably dig up a few more instances in which the conservative common wisdom was wildly inaccurate or ass backwards and Krugman was remarkably prescient.
So Krugman has a record of predicting the future, not merely postulating it. And he has a Noble in Economics to his name. They don’t hand those out for a compelling hypothesis.
General Stuck
@Ronbo:
This is so utterly ridiculous and false, I wonder why I bother to respond to state as such.
And for any readers out there who are unconvinced that parts of the left are as preoccupied with Obama’s race as the wingnuts,. well, here you are. Complete with a black Reagan reference, and the yellow stripe mark of the coward.
This is only going to get worse.
CDT
Right on. Part of the problem in America is that, in the absence of a real “far left,” voters and the poorly informed media assign the “far left” label to moderate or corporatist Democrats. That facilitates the whole righward shift. Part of the reason lefties are frustrated with Obama arises from this phenomenon. It’s not Obama’s fault that, as a moderate consensus-builder, he has been labelled as left-wing, but it is a lamentable development for those who would like to see actual liberal policies advanced. Our stupid media is so ignorant of political substance that, in their horse race coverage, they continue to believe that, say, Obama is as far left as neo-confederates are right.
Ronbo
@Mnemosyne: Are you this desperate for quarters? Richard M Nixon first proposed this health (insurance) care plan. This isn’t left at all. It forces every American to put money into the for-profit healthcare insurance companies. Nearly 40% of my premium goes directly into the healthcare company’s pocket – NOT into healthcare. Are you really this right-wing?
Mnemosyne shoots Mnemosyne misses. At Allen Fieldhouse, you’d hear the crowd chant “airball”.
Stillwater
@Sloegin: This place? Pure 1950s to 1970s Republicanism.
And dude, you’re being generous.
BTD
@DougJ:
While I disagree with what Overton Window actually means, even if it is what it means, what do you propose to do with political opponents who do not follow the Marquis of Queensbury rules that you play by?
Politics is what it is. If you do not want to sully your hands with it, I do not see why you feel it necessary to criticize those who choose to engage in it.
Be above it, fine. But then I don;t see why you think it is necessary to critique those who engage in it.
BTW, Obama is a pol, and does it all the time. He does it for the sake of his political fortunes, as all pols do.
Does that shock you?
Mark
@MikeMc: That has to be one of the dumbest things written on this site, and there’s a lot of dumb shit written here. Do you really think that government spending doesn’t create jobs? Forget the multiplier effect: ffs, what if the government spent $100 trillion dollars to create 1 million jobs, each paying $100k per year?
Mnemosyne
@Sloegin:
Considering that 1950s to 1970s Democrats were all about propping up Jim Crow and preventing African-Americans from voting in the South, I’m not seeing how that’s a bad thing.
We have a very weird idealization of old-time Democrats and seem to conveniently forget that, for example, Strom Thurmond was a Democrat until 1964, which not coincidentally was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed with the help of many Republicans.
For most of the period prior to the 1950s, the Democratic Party was the party of the Dixiecrats. They absolutely were not “progressive” as we define it today.
Andy K
@DougJ:
FIFY
Chyron HR
@Ronbo:
Wow, you sure do like to quote that specific figure. Care to show us the math behind it?
Kenneth
For FUCKS SAKE the man is reading a biography of REAGAN while he’s on vacation!
How much more of a clue do you need?
This country has been fucked up the ass by a double-ridged dildo called “Corporatism” for the past 30 years and Obama has done ZERO to change it, he just maybe wants to use a little more lube.
Mark
@pragmatism: hm, unclear. The implication inherent in that transaction is that you believe in private property rights. Sounds counter-revolutionary to me.
Andy K
@JGabriel:
As if it was the Tea Party idiots threatening to primary Sanders?
Ailuridae
During the health care debate when BJ was getting inundated with one roving troll per thread posting the same tired lies I asked one of them a pretty direct question. If you could choose between the health care bill that was eventually passed with 40B a year in Medicaid expansion and 15B a year in subsidization for the purchase of private insurance or a bill with 30B a year in medicaid expansion 10B a year in subsidies and for private insurance and a public option which would you take? Pretty quickly the person took the second option. And as I told him or her at the time that doesn’t make you a progressive and certainly not more progressive than me or the policy/policies I advocate. In short the person who takes option two there is less concerned with social justice than me. It is just classic limousine liberalism on their part. Less concerned with justice or outcomes and more concerned with what they can consider accomplishments when they have cocktails made with hand-crafted rye between discussions of whether the King’s Speech or the New Sherlock Holmes is more excellent.
It is nothing short of laughable to me that I am supposed to seriously consider someone at FDL further left than I am. My goals re domestic economic policy are almost solely viewed from a social justice perspective. Expanding Medicaid is an amazing step forward from a social justice perspective.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Mnemosyne:
.
.
This is exactly wrong, and invites the Republicans to move ever rightward. Thus, every compromise with them moves us ever rightward — what you call “moving us back towards the left,” an obvious error when the overall trend is considered.
.
.
Aidan
@Zifnab: I don’t really think I was being hyperbolic and I didn’t really mean “far left” as an insult. Of course if you moved them to a country with a completely different political spectrum they would fall in a different place, but FDL exists within and comments on American politics, and Jane Hamsher is certainly someone who I would consider much more left-wing than the average American or the average Democrat. Whether or not that’s a pejorative is in the eye of the beholder; I frequently disagree with what she writes, but for me “far left” is more of a description of her politics than an attempt to dismiss her. I like some of what I read on Firedoglake (Marcy Wheeler usually offers a good perspective and I find Ackerman much more readable than he was in his Too Hot For TNR days), but I’m not a regular reader of the whole site because more often than not I find it hyperbolic, unreasonable, and stylistically unappealing.
Also, saying that Europe’s far left is farther left than America’s doesn’t really disprove anything. A communist might be in the political mainstream in a country with a strong communist party, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be considered far left in the United States.
MikeMc
@bobbo: “They think he’s the guy on “Quincy” That’s awesome! That reminds me of the first time I saw John Bolton on one of the debate shows. I thought, Kurt Vonnegut is a huge dick!
NobodySpecial
@Mnemosyne: Um, that’s another problem. Democrats from that period weren’t exactly all Dixiecrats, y’know. There was some bunch of guys named, I dunno, Kennedy, for example, who didn’t seem to be all about propping up Jim Crow. Then there were those fellas Johnson and Stevenson and…hell, you should get the idea by now.
Ash Can
@Loneoak: Actually, I think the OW theory explains why those “substantive policy gains” are impossible in the short term. Today, a plurality of voters will see such gains as radical, too much too soon, and resist them — and avoid voting for candidates who espouse them. A few years from now, however, when legislation enacted by the 111th Congress is really kicking in, and people are seeing the benefits from the laws, enjoying them, and taking them for granted, then voila — a plurality will start looking favorably upon plans to extend those benefits and make them even more effective.
I can certainly understand DougJ’s sentiment right here. However, insomuch as the OW theory addresses how a large group’s consensus perception changes over time — and how gradual that change is — I think it’s a valid assessment.
Ronbo
@General Stuck: You didn’t respond, you cast aspersions. Which is why you are general stuck when it comes to logic.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Zifnab: but the far left freaks out, and dare I say it, insults him to no end, when krugman supports trade deals, HCR, and the Cadillac tax. People are really inconsistent in waving the KThug flag. If ya gonna fly under his banner, and brandish his credentials, then you have to take the bad with the good.
besides, KThug says he’s a liberal, even wrote a book called “The Conscious of a Liberal”, yet leftys view him as a centrist. That says more about them, than it says about KThug.
pragmatism
@Mark:
i thought we were an autonomous collective. an anarcho-syndicalist commune. we take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. simple majority in the case of property rights. but if we can barter for the right to use property, if not outright own it, i will start raising chickens my friend. or wait for the lady of the lake to lob me a scimitar. whichever comes first.
Allan
The divide is not about left v. right as it is about keyboard activism v. real-world political organizing. Al Giordano is certainly to the left of many of the best-known professional left blogpundits, but is the first to tell you that he wouldn’t want any of them in his foxhole.
Blogistan believes that its relationship with a Democratic president should mirror that between Michael Moriarty and Q.
John
The Overton Window is obviously a real thing. The idea that we can consciously “move the Overton window” through discourse is what is silly.
MattR
@General Stuck: Geez. You could just as easily use your comment as an example of how far Obots are willing to go to defend their man. The black Reagan was unnecessary and could have been as effecitve by calling him a “21st Century Reagan”. But for you to pretend that a reference to the yellow double line in the middle of the road is actually a reference to cowardice is over the top. (Granted I have not read Jim Hightower’s book and maybe he is calling all centrists cowards, but that was not the impression I got from the various reviews)
joe from Lowell
@Kenneth:
This reads like parody.
What willful ignorance. Oh, heavens, we must maintain our purity! Don’t learn about the other side!
I’ve read biographies of Rommel and Speer. I guess that means my politics are Nazi.
eyeroll
Donald Johnson
“What’s the essential difference between far left and far right? Both demand purity of belief and submission to authority. ”
That’s also true of many in the moderate left, the moderate right, and the dead-center. People in the center love to spit on the “extremists” when they have the power to do so.
Zifnab
@Kenneth:
Reagan isn’t a terrible role model to take after as a President, if you’re more interested in politics than policy. He won his second term in one of the biggest landslides in US History and his coat tails swept dozens of like-minded Congressmen into office behind him.
And it would be a bit silly to read a book on Bill Clinton, given that if Obama has any questions he can always just call the dude up and ask him.
Mnemosyne
@Ronbo:
It’s fascinating that you decided to leap right into insults without actually addressing my point that the whole country is further to the right than it was when Richard Nixon was in office.
Apparently you didn’t notice that we were playing soccer, not basketball, because you were too eager to ignore what I actually said and make up a story in your head about what you think I said. The crowd is wondering why the hell you’re dribbling your way down the soccer pitch and screaming “Three points!” as you try to dunk into the net.
NobodySpecial
@John: Then how did the Republicans move it to begin with? Dynamite?
Mark
@Mnemosyne: That’s not completely accurate. Look at the 1928 election. Oklahoma and Texas so abhored the Catholic Dem nominee that they swung R. The Dem coalition was fractured very early on.
JGabriel
pragmatism:
I thought we were a bunch of snarky assholes throwing spitballs at the right — and occasionally making donations and phone calls for Democrats and pets.
.
BTD
@Ailuridae:
You presented a false choice. You write that you would ask “trolls”:
Medicaid expansion is expansion of a public option. How about I presented you with this question – “If you had to choose between 40Ba year in Medicaid expansion and 15B a year for Medicare Buy In but no exchanges or 30B a year for Medicaid expansion and 10B a year in subsidies to be used on a private exchange, which would you take? I bet you would take the second option.
Does that mean you are not a progressive? Hardly. It means you believe in the exchanges as a progressive reform.
Here’s the thing – people disagree on stuff. You did not think much of the public option. Other people (like me) don’t think much of the exchanges.
You are not a troll and neither am I.
We just disagree.
PeakVT
From what I’ve seen, the disagreements in the left side of the blogosphere are almost entirely about what is possible. I can’t remember any major blog disagreeing that a single-payer system wouldn’t be the best way to go. OTOH, terrabytes of bile were generated over whether Obama could single-handedly make the country change it’s health care system.
BTD
@John:
How do you think it is moved then? By events? Does the political discourse really have no effect on it?
That sounds silly to me.
pragmatism
@JGabriel:
oh we are that. also, too. with an occasional python quote thrown in there. that’s how the john coles of the center do it.
joe from Lowell
The important thing to remember is that the most important thing to Protest People is their self image as Protest People. If they aren’t protesting and denouncing, then they aren’t being Protest People – and what if some other Protest People see, and judge them for not being Protest People?!?
It isn’t about ideology at all. It isn’t about being farther to the left. It’s about looking at documentaries about the Sixtiesman and really wanting to be that guy.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Ailuridae: This
BTD
@PeakVT:
Yes, that’s what is what about – the notion that Obama could single handedly do it.
Sheesh.
KG
@Loneoak: You’re absolutely right that history (and culture) help define the political spectrum in societies. The form of government also has something to do with it (monarchy vs republic; proportional representation vs single member districts; etc, etc). A big part of the American experience is our national myth regarding centralized government, taxation without representation, states vs federal power, etc. In most of Europe the districts/states/regions don’t have the autonomy/sovereignty that American States do.
US politics is decidedly to the right of European politics. But US politics are also decidedly left of much of Arabian politics (for all the bullshit we here from the Religious Right, I don’t think many of them would be happy with a Christianist version of Saudi Arabia).
The way I always think of it is like this: if you are going to accept the left-right spectrum (and in all honesty, I don’t really any more), then rather than thinking of it as a straight line, think of it as an incomplete circle (say 350 degrees). On the far left you have communism/Leninism, on the far right fascism/Nazism. While the underlying philosophies are vastly different, on a day to day basis an ordinary person isn’t going to experience much difference (tyranny is tyranny, if you will). American politics seems to me, pretty solidly in the middle of that spectrum. European politics is to the left (though there is much cross over and their spectrum may be wider than ours). Arabian politics is to the right (and probably much smaller as well).
General Stuck
@MattR:
You are kidding right? In a comment confined to describing Obama, someone uses a quote from a book with no other qualifying info, and you think it is over the top that the yellow stripe reference was not in reference to Obama, no matter what the original reference was in said book.
edit – and I was specifically referring to ideations of race in commentary that is insultive, not general Obot/Firebagger disputes on other matters.
Zam
@Ash Can: I agree completely, you don’t move the debate left by proposing a policy that won’t get passed, just look at what has happened after every other attempt at healthcare reform.
Cat Lady
@PeakVT:
Not whether he could, they insisted he didn’t WANT to. He had the votes1eleventy1
MattR
@BTD:
This is mostly true, but I do think that there is a large chunk of left blogistan who are upset because they wanted Obama to try to do it single handedly, regardless of whether or not it would be successful.
@General Stuck: I am absolutely serious. Even if the comment was directed at Obama, it was not calling him a coward. It was talking about the uselessness of centrism. It was in your head that you equated yellow with coward. If our highways had green lines in the center, the quote would be that “there is nothing in the middle of the highway but green lines and armadillos” and it would have been just as appropriate in Ronbo’s original comment but that would not be suggesting that centrists are full of envy.
FlipYrWhig
I don’t think anyone on the front page of a big blog is even slightly close to “far left.” The big split on the liberal blogosphere is between people who think an unabashedly confrontational, adversarial approach to politics would lead to better outcomes and, on the other hand, people who think that accommodation and deal-making lead to better outcomes. The next biggest split is between people who acknowledge that the existence of conservative Democrats (in the electorate and as politicians) is a brake on liberal politics and, on the other hand, people who prefer to think that all Democrats, deep down, are liberal.
It’s really not left/right at all. And although his terms were slightly different, I agree with joe from Lowell that people who have adopted this adversarial/uncompromising approach to liberal politics are essentially flattering themselves to call themselves “far left.” Someone like Al Giordano is IMHO _way_ over to the left, but he basically believes that politics is about maximizing what you can get under the circumstances that are already in effect, and changing those circumstances takes a hell of a long time. Someone like Jane Hamsher isn’t, in my book, anywhere near the left. She just believes in the power of confrontation.
BTD
@Allan:
I love Al, great guy, great agitator. But I’m not sure he has ever won an issue battle in his life.
To coin a phrase, if I had an issue I cared about, Al’s would not be the foxhole I would be looking for (FTR, my foxhole would suck too.)
Hats off to the DADT foxhole. They got it done.
All the rest of us pretty much suck.
Andy K
@BTD:
Talk about false choices….
C’mon, Armando, you know that was off the table, and you know that it was conservadems like Lieberman and Ben Nelson, allied with the entire GOP caucus in the Senate, that was keeping it off of the table.
Boil it down, and this type of reality-challenged thinking is what this argument is about.
Linda Featheringill
@Sloegin:
Thank you.
Love,
the far left :-)
Mnemosyne
@NobodySpecial:
And if we weren’t in the midst of the worst economic situation since 1933, I might agree with you. But when you’re drowning, you really don’t have the luxury of deciding that the life preserver being thrown to you doesn’t quite meet your specifications, so you’re going to wait for the next one to come along.
Again, I really think people are vastly underestimating how far to the right the country has moved since Nixon’s day. Nixon would be a radical far-leftist in today’s Republican Party. Hell, Reagan would be thrown out of the party as insufficiently pure because he raised taxes.
That’s why a move back to Nixon is, sadly, a move to the left — because most of the country is now to Nixon’s right. Denying that it’s a move to the left is actually counterproductive to progressive goals because it pretends we as a country haven’t moved as far to the right as we actually have and causes people to grossly underestimate how much resistance will have to be overcome to get to those goals.
BTD
@FlipYrWhig:
A, a great guy, is mentioned again. Identify one ISSUE battle Al has ever fought and won?
Al does what we do, create a lot of hot air. Sometimes he makes sense. Sometimes he doesn’t.
But in terms of moving the needle, Al has done about what the rest of has. Which is mostly squat.
FlipYrWhig
Also, the amount of _genuine_ “far left” people in America is minuscule. It’d be great if there were more. But there aren’t. The ratio of “far right” to “far left” is probably 1000:1.
General Stuck
@BTD:
I’m sorry. Did you just fall off the turnip truck. That is precisely what this dispute is about.
FlipYrWhig
@BTD: Well, are we trying to talk about ideology, strategy/tactics, or success/effectiveness? Because IMHO those are three different conversations.
John
@NobodySpecial:
Well, the Marxist in me would say it moved as a result of changes in objective economic circumstances.
NobodySpecial
@Zam: Disagree. Republicans have been pretty good at putting forth all sorts of unreasonable policies and riding them with a bullhorn until someone else says ‘Let’s split the difference.’ Look at gay rights. You get a bunch of them calling for the murder of gays or imprisionment and pretty soon you’re happy that one of them says that although gays are going to hell, they’re not gonna get too loud about it as long as they don’t insist on equal rights.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
So, let me get this straight — creating a program that’s to the left of where the Republicans currently stand somehow moves us rightward because, once upon a time, the Republicans held that position.
Jesus, no wonder I usually ignore you. That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.
joe from Lowell
@Mnemosyne:
You two: your entire discussion is missing an important observation, which is that Nixon only proposed that solution to stave off the passage of a single-payer health care reform, not because he actually supported it.
Bob Loblaw
@Cat Lady:
This is an oft-repeated fallacy. There is very little equivalence between the two on the nature of authority.
If anything, the “far left” is characterized by its almost universal contempt and mistrust for anything that even resembles authority.
That’s why I think it’s fair to call, say, Glenn Greenwald of the far left, right alongside the Chomskys and Chalmers Johnsons of the world. They fundamentally disagree with the claim that the US government has any self-evident rationale for the actions it undertakes worldwide. The entire system is fraudulent.
The problem is, the “far left” is often right on the specifics. But they have no possible means for remedying the ills they are able to diagnose.
Also, Mike Kay needs to be housebroken. He’s managed to make WyldPirate look almost civilized.
Linda Featheringill
@JGabriel:
LOL.
Hard to argue with the truth.
[hee-hee]
BTD
@Andy K:
I was making a different point about what defines folks as progressive.
Being for or against a public option does not make someone progressive on health care issues.
If you truly believe that the exchanges are going to reform, or are a key step to reforming, health care delivery and health insurance in this country, then in fact you should be proud and pleased that you were part of the activism that got the health bill passed.
This is the market based reform model.
However, if you believe the health care and insurance market is such that only reforms that move us towards government delivery of health insurance and care, then the health bill fall far short of what you think is required for real reform.
Both are legitimate positions. Neither is more progressive than the other.
These are policy positions with policy differences.
And this is just one of many.
Hell, the entire labelling thing is stupid.
I imagine Mike Kay thinks of me as a Far Left idiot.
But I am almost positive that on any number of issues, my views are to the Right of most of you.
Starting with free trade and moving on to an issue like the war in Afghanistan and preventive detention, I completely and utterly support the President’s “centrist” views.
One of the unsung accomplishments of the Obama Administration has been its outstanding foreign policy. And the Secretary of State, while helpful, is not the key to that.
the President is. It’s funny because all the talk about lack of experience, which I have always disdained, is best proven to me by the President outstanding performance in the foreign policy area.
He is as good as Bush 41 was, and Bush 41 was maybe the best foreign policy President of my lifetime.
John
@Mnemosyne:
This is unfair. The Democratic Party included the Dixiecrats, but it also included the most liberal elements in American political life. From at least the New Deal onwards, if not considerably earlier, the median Democrat outside the south would have been considerably to the left of the median Republican. And most people have always lived outside the south. Even within the south, what liberals there were were members of the Democratic Party – as soon as they began to exist on more than paper, southern Republican Parties were entirely reactionary on virtually every subject.
joe from Lowell
@NobodySpecial:
That’s an awful example. Republican just got completely rolled on gay rights in the DADT debate, and public policy has clearly been moving to the left on that issue for a generation.
NobodySpecial
@Mnemosyne: By that logic, we should have had a liberal revolution during Clinton’s two terms, when the economy was going great guns. Instead we got V-chips, school uniforms, and NAFTA.
At some point, if you actually believe in these things, you gotta produce. Elected Dems don’t produce, and then people bitch because the lefties actually wanna get rid of the nonproductive ones.
Mnemosyne
@NobodySpecial:
And not all Republicans from that period were socially liberal — see Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, etc.
I’m not seeing how pointing that really disproves my point that people who think that the Democrats in Congress were a bastion of liberal policies as we define them today are misreading history in a very serious way.
grael
I agree that the term the ‘far left’ doesn’t fit stuff like kos or atrios. So in discussions with people about that stuff, I like to use the term the ‘online left’. There are plenty of people that compose the left that aren’t part of the blogging community.
Emma
So, Kenneth, you only read books about people you agree with/worship/emulate, right?
John - A Motley Moose
@IM: Right. Michael Moore is a secret Republican.
Makewi
@NobodySpecial:
It’s not that you’re far left, it’s just that you really, really, really hate Republicans and have an excellent imagination.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: IMHO the collapse of the at-least-attempting-to-be-Left-rhetorically Soviet Union seriously messed with the left/right compass in the USA. Even Cold Warriors Eisenhower and Nixon, maybe even _especially_ Cold Warriors, were open to welfare-state approaches to governing. We don’t see that anymore. Even a lot of _Democrats_ are skeptical of social welfare now.
Zifnab
@Mnemosyne:
Well, if the life preserver you are thrown is made out of broken glass and concrete…
Saying, “This is as good as it gets – we should take it” doesn’t address the fundamental concern of whether what we get is genuinely better than the status quo.
Take the tax bill that just got passed. Are we better off than if we’d just let the Bush tax rates reset? If you’re over thirty weeks of unemployment, those UI extension look really nice. But if you’re a state or federal employee, a pay freeze and a kick in the nuts probably isn’t appealing. If Medicare benefits collapse or Social Security gets gutted because Republicans hold the entire budget hostage, I’m personally going to be very upset.
What good is waxing poetic about not having the “luxury” of benefits that are the foundation of why I vote for Democrats in the first place? If you’re going to sell off all the long term social programs for a little up front economic stimulus, why should my 20-something-year old ass vote for you?
Southern Beale
Totally agree, and I’ve brought that up at some other blogs, too. People who disparage the “far left” annoy me to no end. Since when is wanting healthcare for all, wanting to end the last president’s disastrous wars of choice, wanting our wealthiest citizens and corporations to pay their fair share — since when are these “far left” positions? These used to be mainstream American ideas.
Jewish Steel
Sorry if someone already said this upthread but the epithet or badge “far-left” will say volumes more about who is wielding the phrase than whomever it is bestowed upon.
If I call myself far-left I am likely engaging in self valorization and maybe a little woe-is-me martyrizing too. If I am accusing someone of being “far left” then I am saying “wack-a-doodle” in a more serious and analytic seeming way.
NobodySpecial
@joe from Lowell: It’s a great example, because instead of embracing civil rights, elected Dems ran and hid and Clinton had to retreat from full equality to DADT. Pretending that your losses are really victories in disguise does not help your argument.
NR
@Mnemosyne:
Just because something is to the left of where the Republicans currently stand does not make it left overall. You’re engaging in the same logical fallacy that Obama and the Democratic leaders routinely engage in–namely, the idea that a policy being to the left of the modern-day GOP makes it progressive. It doesn’t. It just makes it a little bit less far right than what the Republicans would want–emphasis on the “little bit.”
Adopting the Republican health care reform bill from 1993 does indeed move us further right. And calling it a great progressive victory just means that when it has disastrous consequences–as Republican policies inevitably do–the left will get blamed.
General Stuck
@Bob Loblaw:
authority comes in all shapes and sizes, and not necessarily governmental. The left chooses it’s leaders like any other group, and as with the right wing ideologues pay blind faith to orbs of ideology. Greenwald seems to have reached that status, as have others on the right for their affirmations. These are fringe folks who don’t have much use for government authority, I think is what Cat Lady was referring to via her attachment of purity of belief and not meaning governmental.
BTD
@General Stuck:
That’s in your own mind Stuck. Indeed, you have always sen it that way (and to be fair, so has the FDL crowd.)
I reject that idea and I think most sane people do.
I think the real discussion is about how to achieve the stuff you want to have happen (and guess what, not everyone agrees on what we want to happen – even on the tax cuts, a lot of progressives believe that extending the tax cuts was the right thing to do at this time. I did not agree with that. But that does not make me progressive and them not. It means we disagree.)
In that context, the discussion often turned it to, as is natural, was Obama behaving optimally to achieve the outcome each person might favor.
Of course, Obama was acting to achieve the option he most favored and I am positive he acted in the way he thought best.
What that has to do with how I should feel about it is not plain to me. Obama and I might not only disagree on the policy, we might also disagree on the tactics.
People disagree. The world does not end because of it.
John
@BTD:
Events, mostly. Perhaps discourse can play a role, but I’m not sure that conservative discourse has changed very much in the last 40 years. What has changed is that tons of money has been pumped into conservative discourse.
To the extent that conservative discourse has moved the Overton Window, it is because that discourse has been uniform and backed by an enormous money machine. The existence of that money machine is itself, I think, largely the result of changes in the structure of society over the last 40 years; it is not an independent phenomenon.
The idea that left-wing bloggers can accomplish a countervailing movement of the overton window in the other direction by whining about Obama is deeply misguided.
NobodySpecial
@Makewi: Well, yes, I hate Republicans. Republicans as they stand now represent the worst instincts of humanity. Xenophobia, plutocracy, disdain for law, Manicheism, your modern GOP in a nutshell.
IM
@NobodySpecial:
Wait a moment. Isn’t gay rights the one big example were the discussion moved in the progressive direction?
BTD
@John:
Hmm, I don’t really agree with that but who knows?
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw:
That’s really how you define left? I don’t know about that. I would have said it had more to do with looking out for the most vulnerable members of society. That way “far left” positions are things like expropriating private fortunes and using them to ameliorate the condition of the poor. Authority is less the issue than equity. No?
Mnemosyne
@joe from Lowell:
True. The fact that Nixon proposed a healthcare plan that was to the left of the ACA is beside the point, because he never intended to pass that plan anyway.
MikeMc
@BTD: I have a quick question, BTD. How much do the comment section of a blog effect what the blogger writes? Does that make sense? Take Jon Avervosis for example. They spent a pretty healthy chunk of time bashing Obama. Which, probably got them more like minded readers. Which, now, seems to make it difficult for them to praise him when he does something they like. When DADT was repealed they gave almost no credit to the President. They gave more to Pelosi and Ried. Most of their praise was given to activists. They said they were the ones that made it happen. I find that strange because they didn’t blame activists when the public option was stripped. They blamed Obama. I guess I’m wondering if bloggers treat their readers with kid gloves? Do bloggers write what they truly think or do they write to what their loyal followers expect?
BTD
@John:
Also when you write “The idea that left-wing bloggers can accomplish a countervailing movement of the overton window in the other direction by whining about Obama is deeply misguided. ”
Is there anyone besides “left wing bloggers” that can
accomplish a countervailing movement of the Overton Window” or is it only the Right Wing that can move it?
Allan
@BTD:
This would probably be a good time to remind everyone that you can still make your tax-deductible contributions to the Fund for Authentic Journalism before the year’s end.
Your contributions will help to fund many fine operations, especially the next School of Authentic Journalism session in May, 2011.
Squat indeed.
Linda Featheringill
@BTD:
Interesting. Different. But interesting.
We spend so much time wrestling over domestic policy, we don’t look at foreign policy very often. Perhaps that is understandable as domestic policy will affect us sooner. But because it is understandable doesn’t mean it is advisable.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
Co-signed.
The left vs right nomeclature adopted from European politics has always been a poor fit to the US anyway. We split over a mix of economic, racial and sectional-cultural issues, mixed in with a debate over whether we prefer a parliamentary system of leadership or strong central executive leadership, both at the governmental level and within the partisan political parties. This mix of factors has been varying over time, and yet we try to cram all of that onto a single axis of political preference, mostly because the structure of our first-past-the-post electoral system enforces a binary party structure. The result is we really do not have an effective vocabulary for talking about broad political positions and differences in the US.
Frankly it would be more useful to use the English terms Whigs and Torries and even those terms aren’t a good fit. IMHO we have today a tiny handful of actual not-far leftists, a lot of incrementalist liberals, a fair number of more strident activist liberals, and 17 different flavors on the right ranging from semi-sane to bugfuck nuts.
joe from Lowell
@NobodySpecial:
Uh, yeah, twenty years ago.
I don’t know if you’ve seen any papers lately, but the Democrats just repealed DADT. Really.
So, twenty years ago, an effort was made to eliminate the military’s ban on service by gay people, and it failed. (You do know that gay people were kicked out of the military before Bill Clinton, right?) Fast forward twenty years, and the Democrats successfully got rid of the military’s ban on gay people.
This country had a ban on service by gay people from its earliest days until a week ago, and now it’s gone. The only “pretending” going on here is yours, pretending that eliminating this age-old discrimination is a defeat.
BTD
@MikeMc:
Speaking for me only, I always write what I think.
That’s why Jeralyn makes me write “speaking for me only” on my posts.
MattR
@Zifnab: I was trying to figure out where to place this comment and you gave me a good jumping off point.
One of my biggest frustrations is that I see tons of people complaining about the current system/status quo, but they are never willing to make any changes that could provide long term benefits if it also causes any amount of short term pain.
BTD
@Allan:
A great time. That is a terrific project.
Second the reminder.
Rick Taylor
To paraphrase Elon James White, I don’t consider myself “far-left” so much as “anti-evil.”
JC
Kenneth
This is true, but the 2nd part – Obama has done zero to change it – is what is a jump.
You play politics with the country, media, the Congress, and citizens you have, not the citizens you ‘should’ have.
And the structure simply doesn’t exist to challenge corporatism elitism, sad as it this is. Superman couldn’t do it, in this country.
Until the citizens get totally fed up with the ass-fucking, loving the ass-fucking, and even calling it ‘free enterprise’ and the ‘american way’, Obama can only respond around the edges.
Important to remember, Republicans paid no price for their 100% cynical obstructionism over this two years – they were rewarded for it by voters.
No amount of being right on the policy questions, obscures this political reality.
liberty60
I think this post got snared in moderation- let me try it again without offending words-
Lets toss this out there, and have the commenters peg it as left, far left or ThatWhichShallNotBeNamed:
We hold this truth to be self-evident—that the test of a representative government is its ability to promote the safety and happiness of the people.
We hold this truth to be self-evident—that 12 years of Republican leadership left our Nation sorely stricken in body, mind, and spirit; and that three years of Democratic leadership have put it back on the road to restored health and prosperity.
We hold this truth to be self-evident—that 12 years of Republican surrender to the dictatorship of a privileged few have been supplanted by a Democratic leadership which has returned the people themselves to the places of authority, and has revived in them new faith and restored the hope which they had almost lost.
We have begun and shall continue the successful drive to rid our land of kidnappers and bandits. We shall continue to use the powers of government to end the activities of the malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people.
We have safeguarded the thrift of our citizens by restraining those who would gamble with other peoples savings, by requiring truth in the sale of securities; by putting the brakes upon the use of credit for speculation; by outlawing the manipulation of prices in stock and commodity markets; by curbing the overweening power and unholy practices of utility holding companies; by insuring fifty million bank accounts.
We have built foundations for the security of those who are faced with the hazards of unemployment and old age; for the orphaned, the crippled, and the blind. On the foundation of the Social Security Act we are determined to erect a structure of economic security for all our people, making sure that this benefit shall keep step with the ever-increasing capacity of America to provide a high standard of living for all its citizens.
We have given the army of America’s industrial workers something more substantial than the Republicans’ dinner pail full of promises. We have increased the worker’s pay and shortened his hours; we have undertaken to put an end to the sweated labor of his wife and children; we have written into the law of the land his right to collective bargaining and self-organization free from the interference of employers; we have provided Federal machinery for the peaceful settlement of labor disputes.
Monopolies and the concentration of economic power, the creation of Republican rule and privilege, continue to be the master of the producer, the exploiter of the consumer, and the enemy of the independent operator. This is a problem challenging the unceasing effort of untrammeled public officials in every branch of the Government. We pledge vigorously and fearlessly to enforce the criminal and civil provisions of the existing anti-trust laws, and to the extent that their effectiveness has been weakened by new corporate devices or judicial construction, we propose by law to restore their efficacy in stamping out monopolistic practices and the concentration of economic power.
We believe that unemployment is a national problem, and that it is an inescapable obligation of our Government to meet it in a national way.
Due to our stimulation of private business, more than five million people have been reemployed; and we shall continue to maintain that the first objective of a program of economic security is maximum employment in private industry at adequate wages. Where business fails to supply such employment, we believe that work at prevailing wages should be provided in cooperation with State and local governments on useful public projects, to the end that the national wealth may be increased, the skill and energy of the worker may be utilized, his morale maintained, and the unemployed assured the opportunity to earn the necessities of life.
Yeah, its the 1936 Democratic Party platform. No mincing around with labels or coyly trying to embrace “free market” solutions, these folks proudly stood up and told the fuckers what they stood for, and where they could shove it.
Woodrowfan
@Mnemosyne:
Not entirely true. The Democratic Party in the south ranged from left-wing populists to right wing neo-fascists but was dominated by the conservative wing. The Democratic Party in the north after TRs failed revolt in 1912 was increasingly progressive as the left began to gravitate towards the Democrats and the right began to coalesce among Republicans.
By 1932 the two parts, northern urban and southern conservative were roughly equal in strength in the Democratic Party and needed one another. As I tell my students, both parties were wider coalitions then, far broader than is normal now. There was no such thing as a DINO or RINO in politics. DINOS were found at Sinclair gas stations and RINOS were in the zoo.
Beginning in 1948 the northern wing began to flex a few muscles on Civil Rights. (See Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 Convention) That’s when the southern conservative southern Democrats began to slowly peel away from the Democrats. Eisenhower did well in the South (Little Rock was 1957, after his re-election).
1964 accelerated what had begun in 1948. So your “Democrats as the Party of Jim Crow” needs to shift backwards a decade or so. And even so, much of the left in the US was at home in the Democratic Party and had been since 1912.
FYI, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 are best understood not as party votes, but as regional votes. A large majority of both parties voted for the bill, but it was the north and west voting for and the south voting against.
Linda Featheringill
@FlipYrWhig:
One of the hot issues on the far left is just how much authority is absolutely needed to meet the goals of equitable distribution of work and rewards. Sort of how much of a “necessary evil” do we have to have?
This discussion has been going on 150 years and I don’t think it has been resolved yet.
joe from Lowell
@NR:
Are you actually this gullible?
It’s 1993. Bill Clinton has proposed a health care reform package and it looks like it has a good chance of passing. The Republicans, desperate to stop it, put forward a counter-proposal that they swear they support. They tell everyone that they really, really support health care reform, but they just want this other version. They then use their alleged support for this proposal as political cover as they kill Clinton’s reform. They then take over Congress for the next twelve years, six of which also featured a Republican president, and they make absolutely no effort to pass anything remotely similar to this counter-proposal.
And NR, you conclude from this that the Republicans really, in good faith, supported that proposal from 1993?
Perhaps we can discuss this further as we stroll across this bridge I own, and am looking to sell at a reasonable price.
General Stuck
@BTD:
Oh please, it is not only the FDL crowd. This obsession with Obama’s personal style and substance as the primary reason for policy disappointment on the left blogs is endemic and now is seeming to reach near psychotic proportions. It is even become a mainstay on this little island of once sanity.
And your claims of detachment from all of this is in your head. Always has been.
It is personal, this growing hate of Obama from the tiny number of blog leftists, and it is more and more taking on racist memes and some other truly disgusting attributes as well. Luckily, for Obama and us obots on the web, the mindless shrieking from the nutroots and increased untethered nature from reality, is making them irrelevant, other than cries in the wilderness of despair of their own making.
edit – in short. retards
Mnemosyne
@NR:
Sigh. I didn’t say it makes that legislation “progressive.” I said it moves the discourse back to the left because the Republicans have moved further right in the intervening 15 years.
Taking a position to the left of current Republicans actually takes us further right how, again?
Again, note that I’m not saying the ACA was a great progressive victory with no flaws. I’m saying that establishing the principle that all Americans should have access to health care moves the discourse back to the left, because the position on the right is that health care is a luxury good that only people with money should have access to.
Ailuridae
@BTD:
That was worthy of McMegan. Dumbass, I would pick the first option you presented every time. Because, you know I am an actual fucking progressive and the first one is far more just.
John
@BTD:
Changes in the Overton Window largely result from changes in objective circumstances. I think the country has become more right wing over the last 50 years as a result of the relative economic decline of the United States and cultural resistance by the majority to advances in equality over that time period. The far right has been able to exploit those feelings because it has tons of money at its command, but it didn’t really cause them in any real way.
Basically, I think that the Overton Window at any given moment is very difficult to consciously move, and that what changes occur will generally be in directions indicated by objective circumstances. We can change where we go within the Overton Window, and that can itself have a long-term effect on the window, but advocating policies outside it generally isn’t going to get you anywhere. The key success for conservatives has not been moving the Overton Window rightwards – that was probably going to happen anyway. It has been insuring that one of the two political parties is consistently at the rightmost edge of the window so that they can exploit any movement rightwards to the greatest extent.
I think if you look at the developed world more broadly, one can see that the Overton Window has moved right everywhere over the past decades, but that in most countries the mainstream center-right party has not been taken over by far-right wing ideologues. The movement of the Democrats from New deal Liberalism to neo-liberalism can be found mirrored in the developments of the mainstream social democratic parties in most European countries. The movement of the Republicans from Eisenhower to Palin is not replicated elsewhere.
Cat Lady
@Bob Loblaw:
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Castro say hello. Left ideological purity has had some real world testing.
joe from Lowell
@Mnemosyne: Isn’t it funny how people who like to style themselves as wordly and skeptical of authority like to selectively accept the self-serving assertions of Republicans, even when those assertions are utterly naked of any supporting evidence in Republican’s actions?
Uh, yeah, Republicans really, really love the idea of spending money collected through a progressive income tax to subsidize the purchase of health insurance for poor people who can’t afford it on their own. Sure they do. You can tell, because they said so when they were trying to defeat another health care reform proposal, and they’re such honest people.
BTD
@General Stuck:
I am detached from all pols, as you should be.
I am passionate about the issues I care about.
I do disagree with Obama’s political style. I have for a long time.
I don’t think it has served my issues well, though it probably has served Obama’s political fortunes very well.
BTD
@John:
That’s a good comment John. I have to think about what you wrote there.
Anya
DougJ, what should we call @Ronbo: because his assertion that President Obama “has maintained 98% of the Bush Agenda” is so delusional it defies labels.
joe from Lowell
@liberty60: Do you realize you just quoted a platform that says:
and concluded
IM
@John – A Motley Moose:
A rockefeller republican!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Woodrowfan:
I think this is key point. A lot of US politics makes more sense to me (YMMV) when understood as contest between hostile cultures (with a strong ethnic and sectional bias) rather than a purely ideological struggle. And if you believe Kevin Phillips (IMHO I think he makes a strong case) these cultural fault lines are very, very old, in fact they predate the existence of the US as a nation. Which suggests to me that their transmission mechanisms are of extraordinary strength and we should not expect them to go away anytime soon. But what changes from era to era is which ideological questions are chosen to be the most potent ammunition in the ongoing culture wars.
A big change since the 1930s-1950s is that the blue cultural side has lost substantial ground on economic issues while gaining ground on racial and cultural issues, and visa-versa for the red side.
Mnemosyne
@liberty60:
Just out of curiosity, do you remember what was happening in Europe at this time? Maybe that there was a huge clash between competing systems that rich Americans were desperate to prevent from overtaking their country, so they were willing to support some social reform so they wouldn’t end up like the kulaks?
Bob Loblaw
@FlipYrWhig:
I think it’s that equality can only be advanced through dissolution, divestment, and democratization of existing power structures. I think the test of irredeemability of institutions to heal themselves is the jumping off point for more radical and “far left” schools of thought.
BTD
@Ailuridae:
Worthy of McMegan? Dumbass? Sorry,I did not mean to offend you.
I guess I misremembered you as being a strong supporter of the exchanges a vital part of reform.
I truly am sorry that I misremembered.
Yet I did not mean it as an insult.
Can I ask a further question though – is it then about the funding?
Because let’s ask a different question – same funding for Medicaid for both choices – but $15B for subsisiies usable on exchanges versus $10B for Medicare Buy in.
To weit, less money but Medicare Buy In vs. Exchange with a little bit more subsisdies.
What’s your preference? I’d take less moeny with Medicare Buy In over Exchanges with higher subsidies.
How about you?
MikeMc
@JC: That is the most jarring part of the 2010 midterms. Sadly, this is why I think this is a center right country. One party worked their asses off. One party complained. The former got crushed. What does that say about the American voter?
Ailuridae
@Makewi:
It’s like a HoF of ignorant BJ trolls. BTD, Makewi, BoB …. where are mclaren, WyldPyrate and the others
BTD
@Ailuridae:
Here’s what’s interesting to me.
I think I have insulted no one at BJ in years.
And I get called a troll again by a guy who calls anyone who disagrees with him a “dumbass?”
I’ve given all the internet insulting up for a while now but this one tempts me.
liberty60
@joe from Lowell: Yes, the stimulus of gummint money.
Bottom line, those New Dealers were proud to embrace the government as an agent to counteract the private sector; they didn’t flinch from saying the government should employ people when the private sector can’t.
They didn’t freak out or run and hide whenever someone shouted “Sockulist!”
Show me one Democrat who would dare say this today:
“We shall continue to use the powers of government to end the activities of the malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people. “
joe from Lowell
@John:
Hey, now.
The far right in this country is the KKK, the Christian Dominionists, and the neo-Nazis. Don’t make the same mistake, in the other direction, that Doug J is calling out in the post.
Mnemosyne
@Woodrowfan:
I’m painting with a very broad brush, it’s true, but it really bugs me when people claim that the Democrats have always represented only what’s right and true and the Republicans have always been exactly as evil as they are today. The actual history is much messier and more convoluted than that.
General Stuck
@BTD:
politics is an action sport, and not all of us can suffer the luxury of high brow pol musing from a far. You have to get elected to get what you want, and without active support from supporters, balanced with issue activism, all you have is eternal detachment begetting eternal disappointment caught in an eternal cipher of faith without works. No one here gets out alive, and neither do those who remain on the sidelines handing out grades to the players.
Democracy and participation doesn’t end with elections, it begins with elections, and any president is only as powerful as is his day to day support. You might want to rethink that detachment thingy, it is not as righteous as you think.
Linda Featheringill
@Cat Lady:
Hitler and the Shah of Iran also say hello. And they weren’t lefties.
Mnemosyne
@liberty60:
Well, no, because there were actual sockulists running for office in those days, so people didn’t use it as a synonym for “Democrat” like they do today. Read up on the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair and FDR’s support for Sinclair’s Republican opponent before you start claiming that FDR wasn’t afraid of sockulists.
joe from Lowell
@liberty60:
Sort of like the stimulus of government money in the ARRA. Or all of the government money going to private-sector insurers in the ACA.
I think this is the important differences: I don’t care very much about what they say, because this isn’t a reality show designed to make me pump my fist in the air. I want actual legislation.
j low
@BTD: Check and mate.
joe from Lowell
@BTD: You asked:
I’d just like to point out that the difference between those two is infinitesimally small, when compared to no bill passing and no money being spent on any system to get people covered.
MattR
@General Stuck: If “detached” means the opposite of “involved and participating”, then I agree with you. If “detached” means the opposite of “emotionally tied to”, then I agree with BTD.
Mnemosyne
@Linda Featheringill:
I think Cat Lady was pushing back against the idea that No True Leftist could ever be authoritarian. I’ve seen people try to claim that, and it’s just as stupid as when people try to claim that the Nazis were on the left because they had the word “SociaIist” in their name. Authoritarianism can show up on either side of the political scale.
BTD
@joe from Lowell:
That’s a different point. As I wrote earlier, Allurdaie was making a “who is more progressive than thou” argument by posing a slanted hypothetical.
I answered with a slanted one of my own.
And then modified it to a one with slight monetary difference, to emphasize the POLICY difference regarding an aspect of reform.
If indeed, that difference would have sunk the bill, then, as most of us did, we ended up supporting the bill. Some of us remain dissatisfied with the reform part of the bill.
Jack Bauer
@NobodySpecial:
Worth repeating.
Linnaeus
Let me say that this is the first time in my eight years of scintillating and insightful blog commentary that something I’ve written has been deemed worthy of follow-up in a “major” blog post and has generated not inconsiderable discussion. I’m flattered, actually.
@Mike Kay:
Well, my feelings certainly aren’t hurt; my point was to say that I think the label “far left” as it has been used on some liberal blogs as of late is 1) loaded and 2) decontexualized and that I thought that wasn’t helpful, which is not to say that some of the rhetoric critical of the president isn’t excessive. My feelings are immaterial to all that.
For what it’s worth: calling Obama (or any US politician, for that matter) “Hitler” is absolutely outrageous and a prime example of corrosive political discourse. I actually had to deal with this kind of thing this summer when I was talking with a friend’s mother who has gone full metal teabagger; even though I may be critical of the president on some issues, the right’s attempt to make him into a singular leftist villain is something I also adamantly oppose.
Ailuridae
@BTD:
I am only in favor of the exchanges for creating a market place in a world where the private individual market is maintained. Because, you know, thats by far the most just situation within that scenario.
But again for most of you “progressives” this wasn’t about helping people but achieving what you perceived to be a more European solution. I know what your answer to my question would be and, frankly, I find that answer contemptible.
As for me I’ve repeatedly and unambiguously advocated for a Medicare Buy in especially at above cost for those under 50 (to ensure Medicare’s long term viability) along with removing the state level commitments to Medicaid and S-chip and and folding them all into Medicare. Why is that? Because I am actually a progressive? Unlike much of the left blogosphere.
BTD
@General Stuck:
“Suffer the luxury?” What does that mean? I vote and occasionally give to candidates I like. I bloviate on a blog.
What else do you do that I don’t do?
JC
MikeMC,
Well, even this is ‘understandable’. It’s an off year. People don’t pay attention. The other side was motivated. People were overwhelmed with Citizen United ads.
Blah blah blah.
All of which have some ‘validity’. You have a disengaged, anxious electorate, a media that is more interested in conflict than educating, and huge amounts of corporate money gaming the system.
But the bottom line is, the Republicans paid no price for utterly destructive and cynical game playing. They were rewarded.
That the Republicans paid no price at the polls, that their policy malpractice was rewarded with political gains, is how bad the entire political structure is in the U.S.
Thinking that Obama can beat that back, is simply wrong. This is the mistake that progressives make again and again, with one prime example being Open Left. I like – a lot – the policy prescriptions there. But they are clueless – clueless, and make simply mindless assertions – that if you just propose ‘good’ policy, this will magically voted on successfully into law.
If you ‘fight for it’.
And ignore that people like Alan Grayson, did just that.
And lost handily.
This is the problem – which I share, to a degree – with the idealistic left. that you can just ‘take a stand’, and you’ll win.
But the political reality doesn’t work that way.
BTD
@Ailuridae:
I don’t even know what your question is that you know my answer to and know you would find contemptible.
Have you ever taken a step back and read what you write?
I know that my history makes this a pretty laughable statement, but why not try to engage in a discussion of contrasting reasoning instead of looking for the first perceived opportunity to be insulted and to issue your contempt citations.
KG
@liberty60:
It seems to me that you may be falling into a trap that many on the right have fallen into. For many Republicans, it is always 1980… that is why they have the same answers that they did then Missile Defense! Tax Cuts! Deregulation! I think there are some on the left for whom it is always 1930. We live in a different world, a lot of history between now and then, experiences that have changed opinions and perspective. What worked then (both policies and rhetoric) won’t necessarily work now.
Mike in NC
Isn’t the “Far Left” anybody who even mildly disagrees with Hannity, Limbaugh, and FOX News? That’s how the mainstream media has evolved.
Woodrowfan
@Mnemosyne:
OK, that’s fair….
Ailuridae
@BTD:
You were a spectacular troll and a dumbass during the HCR debate. You would pop up like a weasel spout whatever ridiculous talking point that the FDL crown was making that day and disappear once you were confronted with facts. And then two days later you would do the same thing.
I’m sorry you think that you have in some way earned a reprieve from my accurately pointing out your past behavior. You already made some idiotic point advocating that I would choose private market based exchanges over a larger public health care expansion despite, at no point, my ever suggesting anything to that effect.
Brian S.
The defining feature of American politics is its moderation.
The European countries (aside from Britain which is the closest to our own in terms of the political spectrum) not only have far-left parties in Parliament, they also have stridently nationalist far-right parties that would make Palin blush.
Seriously, folks, LePen came in second place in a French Presidential election. He’s FAR to the right of Sarah Palin.
European politics goes further left AND further right than ours. It’s not further to the left, its just more extreme in general. Mostly because our Constitution encourages consensus building and compromise while Parliamentary systems encourage partisanship.
Cat Lady
@Linda Featheringill:
Confirming my original point about no essential difference between extremes of left and right. Each example requires true believers to put ideology into action. Do. Not. Want.
Mnemosyne
@Linnaeus:
I think this is part of the problem that you identified, though: the right wing has successfully managed to make Barack Obama, a politician whose beliefs go right down the actual center of American politics (as opposed to the Broderian “center”) into someone as far left as Stalin or Lenin in the eyes of many Americans. That automatically pushes anyone to his left into the far left — if Obama is a horrible sociaIist who wants to use death panels to kill Grandma while he gives all of your property to
blackpoor people, just imagine what the people further to the left of him are like!I think a lot of people were already primed to think of him as a far leftist because they still have old pictures of Huey Newton and Malcolm X stuck in their heads, but the fact that there is absolutely no one out there who can say, “No, that’s stupid, he’s not on the far left at all” and be listened to is a major contributor to the problem.
Anonne
@MikeMc: It says that the average American voter is easily manipulated by fear and their own greed.
As for the actual discussion, we should not conflate far left policy with the tone and volume of critics along the spectrum. I don’t consider Jane Hamsher/FDL to be “far left” in policy positions, as she is not advocating for communist or socialist policy. She is just very vocal.
The wingnuts consider anyone left of Palin to be a RINO and a closet socialist. The average American, however, wouldn’t know real socialism if it hit them in the face. That’s why the “most liberal president since LBJ” meme sticks.
Bob Loblaw
@BTD:
I’m not really sure it’s possible for me to disagree more. I think if you were to look at how the Obama administration has performed globally, there are only (maybe) three areas of success so far. Russia, Korea, and, I guess, India.
Russian approachment is the most obvious achievement, and it was direly needed. The only way to cut through the mafia state’s power is by denying it credible isolation from the US and especially Europe. The work that has been done on NATO and security council issues is fantastic. Korea is pretty self-explanatory. And threading the India conundrum with regards to Afghanistan and globalization has been deft, especially after the routine screwups next door in Pakistan.
But after that? Yeesh, the bottom falls out. The administration has no particular Latin American or African policies. Maybe that’s due to the economy, maybe not. Every single international economic body outside of the Fed is completely useless. The attempts to encircle China are based on the same racist claptrap about Yellow Perils and bullshit armchair psychology from our Japanese and Korean regional “experts.” The Chinese economy is a fucking timebomb, but this administration is every bit as willing as its predecessors to build a new global boogeyman and deal with the now-indispensable nation on a level that is largely fact-indifferent.
And then the Muslim world. What a disaster. It’s telling that standards have sunk so low that the formation of the doomed Iraqi government after almost a year is now a “success.” Is there even a hint of daylight between the Bush and Obama policies on Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Gaza and Turkey, etc? And let’s not talk about the Afghanistan war. Way to fuck up in a way that increased the threat of militant islamism in Pakistan, well done all.
If this is the new standard of excellence, then Bush and Cheney have done more damage to diplomatic perspectives than I thought possible.
General Stuck
@BTD:
I argue with idiots more than I should on mostly irrelevant liberal blogs. Nothing to brag about though. Someday, I do hope to wise up on that front.
General Stuck
@MattR:
Don’t care who you agree with.
Ailuridae
@BTD:
That’s a different point. As I wrote earlier, Allurdaie was making a “who is more progressive than thou” argument by posing a slanted hypothetical.
For fuck’s sake. It wasn’t a slanted hypothetical. For months we had commenters including you repeatedly and unapologetically saying that without a public option that any bill that passed couldn’t be viewed as a progressive achievement or reform. To which I took the largest part of the bill (the Medicaid expansion) and asked multiple of those commenters whether they would be willing to lop off a significant portion of the Medicaid expansion to get their public option. That’s not a slanted hypothetical. It an obvious immediate follow up to an assertion many of you repeatedly made. If you assert that a bill isn’t progressive enough without X and I offer to trade you some portion of the largest portion of the bill you are criticizing in exchange for X that’s a perfectly fair hypothetical. Heck it is a hypothetical that is the immediate follow-up to said criticism.
Now, what you did in response was indeed a slanted hypothetical. But that’s what you do. I have no idea whether it’s intentionally dishonest or you just don’t think clearly.
arcadesproject
‘Left’ and ‘Far left’ are just frames designed to denigrate policy positions without engaging in stressful activity like fact gathering and rational argument. It’s neo-redbaiting and people who care about the discourse should abandon it.
MattR
@General Stuck: I see. You care so little you had to take the time to let me know.
General Stuck
@Ailuridae:
BTD remains cooly detached from it all, even from himself, and what he said five minutes or five months ago. The existential blogger. None of it matters, you see, in the end.
BTD
@Ailuridae:
I did not ask for a reprieve from you nor do I agree with your characterizations.
I see no reason to engage you any further.
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne: Can’t really argue there. A big problem with out public political discourse.
And I’m off to go watch MNF in a bit. Night, folks!
agrippa
Far left?
There is no far left in the USA. There is not even a viable democratic socialist or social democratic party or movement in the USA. There has not been either one for over 50 years.
MikeMc
@Bob Loblaw: “Is there even a hint of daylight between the Bush and Obama policies on Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Gaza and Turkey, etc?” What would you have him to do differently? Don’t just talk shit – have an answer.
BTD
@General Stuck:
Amazing the hostility from this crowd.
What are you folks so enraged about exactly?
General Stuck
@MattR:
Same amount of time you took to inform me of something I didn’t request. All things being equal. I try to respond to all queries, even those I don’t care to respond to.
General Stuck
@BTD:
That wasn’t “rage” my friend. It was rank dismissal. Note the difference.
Nick
The “far left” isn’t even “far left.”
Some on OpenLeft are to the right of Dana Rohrabacher on Immigration for example.
Ailuridae
@BTD:
Good. Please take your brand of stupid dishonest hackery somewhere else, dumbass
BTD
@General Stuck:
Noting to brag about indeed.
I also am trying to break that habit.
Yet here I am. .
Good evening to all.
amk
It’s ironic that both the lefty loonies and the righty wingnutz are so fixated on the President (while ignoring the other two branches with real power) with diametrically opposite views (he is a corporate ass-kisser vs he is a soshalist hitler) while Obama himself completely ignores both of them and continues to do things in his own way. That purposeful equanimity is admirable in any leader.
If indeed he becomes a one-termer (which again seems to be the only point both the loony left and the crazy right agree upon), it won’t be his personal loss. He has done enough in the first two years for historians to judge him favorably.
All the kvetching from the americans only indicates that they are only childish morons and entitlement whores and hence will be continued to be manipulated by the moneyed class.
Linda Featheringill
@Mnemosyne:
You may be right. Perhaps I misunderstood.
But the deeper truth may be that authoritarianism is a separate issue.
Brian S.
@agrippa:
And again OTOH, there’s no truly far-right faction with any political influence either.
I mean far-right in the European sense. The Teabaggers are crazy, but they’re not as nutso as Jean-Marie Le Pen or the Vlaams Belang.
Ailuridae
@BTD:
That you’re a blatantly intellectually dishonest hack who pollutes the comments to threads while never acknowledging\apologizing\owning up to when you were caught being dishonest before?
Brian S.
And again OTOH, there’s no truly far-right faction with any political influence either.
I mean far-right in the European sense. The Teabaggers are crazy, but they’re not as nutso as Jean-Marie Le Pen or the Vlaams Belang.
Brian S.
I mean, really, Jörg Haider makes even Tom Coburn look downright cuddly in comparison.
Nick
@amk:
The snow stopped falling 12 hours ago here in New York and the city is having one gigantic media-led hissy fit because all the streets aren’t plowed yet.
In the last blizzard of this magnitude, 10 months ago, it took 2 days for them to plow the whole city after the snow stopped. It’s been 12 hours.
Linda Featheringill
@Cat Lady:
Peace.
We might even agree.
MattR
@General Stuck:
But I didn’t make any pretense about “not caring”. OTOH, I am glad to see my effort to show you that I read, digested and largely agreed with something you wrote (which is different from our normal interactions) was so successful.
General Stuck
@MattR:
You are alright in my book MattR. If my blunt manner was or seemed to insult, then I apologize. It grates that I spend so much time on this blog defending against brain dead zombie memes over and over again, then sometimes get accused of those efforts equating to being overly attached to Obama, or worshipful . There are legitimate complaints about obama’s administration, that I have, as do others of his supporters. But there just isn’t the space and time to rationally discuss them, what with the non stop bullshit from the left. It makes me cranky is all.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Nick: what ‘hood do you live in?
Nick
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Forest Hills, Queens…just moved here two months ago from Williamsburg, Brooklyn
MattR
@General Stuck: Understood. Fair enough. Give Charlie a pat for me.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Mnemosyne:
.
.
Notice the unprovoked use of imaginary personal slurs to make an argument. Also too, notice that my most important point – the overall trend thru time – is completely ignored.
If you keep moving to the right, thru time, by splitting the difference, ie, compromising, with increasingly insane Republicans, you are not moving to the left, thru time. You are moving to the right. In this case, it’s 1993 and their “health plan.” Next time, it will be 1995… Eventually, and inevitably according to your way of thinking, you will indeed arrive at the 2010 Republican position sooner or later, while they will be at their 2050 position by that time. And then worse the time after that. There is no question that this is a true statement, is there? Address the trend as directed.
If you cannot understand this concept without me generically insulting you and trying to make you cry, I can arrange for some harsh language to be directed in your direction – just beg me like a dog and I will attempt to comply. Or you may apologize to me at any time after commenting upon the trend argument as described above.
.
.
Ronbo
@Mnemosyne: Does anyone else wonder just exactly Mnemosyne has to chime in on just about every comment? Is he or she making a quarter per post – pushing every discussion to the right? I’ve seen where marketing firms pay individuals to push discussion groups.
Perhaps Mnemosyne’s theory that America has turned right is incorrect and is simply being “pushed” for profit. Issue by issue, America has turned Left. As the percentage of impoverished Americans increases, they invariably move left of center.
I always question when someone makes illogical arguments to muddy issues. For example, I noted that his/her comment was unresponsive to the actual statenment at hand saying “he shoots, he misses”. Instead of actually correcting him/herself on facts, he responds that he was playing soccer – that I must be incorrect. WTF?
Note that Mnemosyne and General Stuck use the same style of corraling (sorry for the spelling) issues always to the right. You’d think that if they were moderate or liberal, they would occasionally correct some of the right-winger thoughts. No, to them they must always move posters to the right.
Now, earn some extra quarters by trying to insult me and keep me quiet!
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Nick: elitist :~P
amk
@Nick: Hey, I used to live there in my post graduate days in 1983-85. Nice place. “Elitist” even. :)
Bob Loblaw
@Cat Lady:
If your understanding of history is limited to the extent you think Stalin came to power because of his deep compassion for the fate of the proletariat, then yes, I can see why you would favor a simple dichotomy.
On the other hand, you might recognize that the country you live in was similarly invented by radical far-left revolutionaries of their time, and that fascism and cultures of violence and oppression have evolved from the hallowed “center” as well. It isn’t a simple sort of thing. Extremism can blossom out of anywhere, at any moment. One could argue the global wars on terror and drugs are the most fascist international enterprise we have going at the moment, after all…
@MikeMc:
Is this serious? Wishing that they could just close their eyes, and when they open them, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah might just disappear would be a good starting point. If you’re going to play realpolitik, play it all the way out. Of course, I’d recommend abandoning realpolitik in the region altogether, because I think the contradictions are too strangling. You can’t say you’re a proponent of democratization and human rights one day, and then spend the next handing over billions of dollars to the Mubaraks of the world. It makes you look ridiculous, it obliterates your credibility on everything else, and only sets up future failure when the oil states go plooey anyway.
Brian S.
@Bob Loblaw:
I’m curious. What do you mean by the Chinese economy is a “timebomb”? That could mean many things.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@amk: didn’t you want to walk on the wide side (to borrow a phrase) and live in the east village, during the bad ole days?
amk
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): I was a friggin’ student eeking out a living out of a friggin’ research fellowship. Manhattan and the village was for pure gawking only.
Bob Loblaw
@Brian S.:
They build entire cities that have no actual people in them. There aren’t even words for that bubblicious recklessness. They’re a hyperinflation event waiting to happen.
Brian S.
@Bob Loblaw:
I’ve been to China, and I totally agree. They’re about to go off the rails. It’s Japan 1989 + Dubai 2007 multiplied by 1,000.
The “yellow peril” is some much racist bullshit.
But there was an off chance you meant “timebomb” in the sense that it would blow up America by becoming the wealthiest nation in the world. That’s what I was trying to clarify, just in case you’re like that massive toolbag Tom Friedman.
agrippa
@Brian S.:
I have my doubts about China. There seems to be a real difference between the developing coast and the very poor interior. The problems in the far west – communal riots – looked ominous to me.
I have questions about the CCP and how corrupt it may be. Is there a variant of ‘crony capitalism’ developing?
@amk:
Your 222: I have the same impression as you do.
Brian S.
@agrippa:
That, and authoritarian systems are just basically inferior to parliamentary/democratic ones in the long term, though authoritarian systems can sometimes look better in the short term.
India will replace the USA as the next hegemon, not China, and even that won’t happen until +/- 2050 or so. Which isn’t such a bad thing.
The British Empire lives on once again, heh.
Mnemosyne
@Ronbo:
Because I’m on vacation and don’t have anything better to do today. I only just showered an hour ago. What’s your excuse?
agrippa
@Brian S.:
I am betting on India as well. I see Pakistan as India’s big problem. Those two countries fought each other four times since 1947. Politically and economically, India has great potential. China looks brittle to me.
Glinda
@DougJ: No difference at all. When ideology rules thought and dismisses evolutionary action that actually moves toward the “thinker’s” goal, be that “thinker” “left” or “right”, that *suckah* is definItely effin’ insane … or at least stuck in some early elementary school state of “I want it NOW!” In other words: they are severely stunted emotionally and it spills over into the political.
“Far” as an adjective for those binary political orientations is merely the euphemism for “crazy”.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
Yes, Uncle Clarence Thomas, I’m the one who spends 90 percent of their time on this website making personal slurs. Any of your other faults you’d like to project onto me?
Except that by actually passing a healthcare bill, the move to the right has been halted. The movement is now towards the left.
That’s the whole point: if the Republicans are able to control both the discourse and control the laws, you move further and further to the right. If all they have is control of the discourse but you can move the laws to the left, you can move everything to the left. That’s because, contrary to what you seem to think, the discourse is not everything. The laws that are passed by Congress matter even more.
The Republicans can bitch and moan all they want about the horrors of “Obamacare,” but the conversation has now moved in the direction of healthcare being a right. They will need to re-convince people that healthcare should only be for the rich before they can move things back to the right. Why do you think they panicked so much and poured so much corporate money into convincing old white people that Obama was going to take their Medicare away and turn them all into soylent green? It wasn’t because they were all high-fiving each other and congratulating themselves on moving the country further to the right by establishing healthcare as something all Americans should have.
When the discourse stops and the actual laws are passed, that’s when the movement takes place. That’s what Bill Clinton didn’t understand, but what I think Obama does. That’s why I don’t think we’re going to see a spate of school uniforms and V-chip laws for the next two years.
Brian S.
@agrippa:
And, see, Pakistan (and Islamic fundamentalism) is also our biggest problem, along with an increasingly belligerent China. India shares the latter concern, too, and we’re both federal, multicultural, English-speaking (more or less) democracies.
Andy K
@BTD:
And I fully agree with you. I still think you’re missing the point (unless something has changed since I had to leave- it was collect on the Christmas promise from my kid tonight or lose it), which isn’t “they” are further left or more progressive because anyone- you, I or them- says so, but, according to the Firebaggers, some of us aren’t progressive because we see the need to compromise. Fuck, I don’t know of anyone in the prog-o-sphere who wouldn’t look like Mr. Monopoly being informed of a bank error in his favor if they found out that the public option or single payer schemes were going to be signed into law.
BTW, I like you even if I don’t always agree with you- and I agree with you on some of those things over which you’d think we might disagree. Had you stuck around Third Branch for longer than you did, you’d know that. :D
John
@Brian S.:
This is true, but misses a lot. The mainstream center-left party in most European countries tends to have positions roughly similar to those of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The mainstream center-right party tends to have positions roughly similar to those of Susan Collins or Scott Brown. The median of the Republican Party is at about the same point as the far right extremes of the Tories or the CDU or the Gaullists, and there are figures with considerable influence and power within the GOP coalition whose positions are comparable to those of many marginal far right parties in Europe.
If you look at the actual positions of the Front National in France, for example, the right-wing ones really don’t seem that much to the right of the Republican mainstream. He opposes immigration, wants to reinstate the death penalty, limit access to abortions, and such like. The main way Le Pen differs from the Republicans is economic populism – he supports the welfare state and wants protective tariffs.
Le Pen’s party also, of course, has a far right pedigree that is much more extreme than that of the GOP, but what makes Le Pen a right wing extremist is that the French business elite views him as beyond the pale, while Pat Buchanan, who is probably the prominent American figure closest to Le Pen in terms of his actual views, gets to mouth off on MSNBC every day, and other radical right wingers with more orthodox views on economic issues and foreign policy than Buchanan get to have actual significant influence within the Republican party.
Also, Le Pen coming in second was an artifact of the weird splintering of votes in the first round of the 2002 election. Le Pen got the 15% or so of the vote he always gets, but the Socialist vote collapsed because lots of usually Socialist voters voted for the Trotskyists as a protest.
John
@agrippa:
There is not even a viable democratic socialist or social democratic movement or party in the European countries where the main center-left party is called the Socialist, Social Democratic, or Labour Party, either.
agrippa
@Brian S.:
Agreed.
Pakistan has never gotten its’ act together. I doubt if Ali Jinnah would like today’s Pakistan.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Mnemosyne:
.
.
Thank you for your apology. You were clearly in the wrong here, as I made no personal slur against you in my argument, and I recognize that it takes a big balloonbagger to admit she was wrong.
I think you are laughably incorrect. (See Elections, 2010.) I also think the actual health care bill, as passed, has enshrined the for-profit aspect of basic health care for many years to come. This is a key victory for the Right. When Medicare was first passed, it was intended to gradually lower the qualifying age over time, until all were covered. Compare that plan with this inadequate and immoral legislation. What is the movement trend over time, to the left or to the right?
I urge you to consider matters in the long term.
.
.
El Cid
I remember back when the “far left” meant those more radical than, say, Communists who wanted to be elected.
As a long-time nut-squad way out loony far leftist, I find the use of the term — if meant to be anything other than derision — simply empty if applied to blog writers who hate Democrats supposedly from a more liberal view.
And a long, long time ago, there actually was a left.
Glinda
@Ronbo: I love this absurd juxtaposition:
… followed by:
You haven’t provided a lick of logic to your assertion that “As the percentage of impoverished Americans increases, they invariably move left of center.” That has been demonstrably incorrect in the past 20 years.
Anne Laurie
@agrippa: __
There’s plenty of people think the CCP’s “Crown princelings” have more in common with our American autocrats (the Bush, Koch, Walton families) than either group does with their presumed fellow citizens.
Dollared
Thank you Doug. It is amazing the shit people take on this blog from unintelligent people like Mike Kay and thoughtful but aggressively DLC people like the General, merely for actually believing that the Democratic Party should work hard to achieve the policies embodied in its national platform document.
We all should be on the same page here, and arguing mostly about tactics. Instead, this place really has degenerated over the last six months.
Triassic Sands
@Mnemosyne:
Economies of scale really matter with something like a public option. Individual states are probably not populous enough to make a public option an effective counterweight to private insurance companies. Trying something that is probably doomed will simply “prove” that it was a bad idea all along, and that’s a really, really bad idea.
Texas is the second most populous state, with lots of poor people. The Republican overlords in Texas hate Medicaid (and poor people), but that won’t be enough to allow them to drop out of Medicaid and create their own health care program for the poor, even though their home-grown program would probably be designed to save money at the expense of poor people (their health, not their wallets).
Washington State, until this year, has had its own health care plan (Basic Health) for low income people. Budget deficits have led the (Democratic) governor to call for the elimination of the entire program. A state public option would probably be similarly targeted in fiscal hard times. Anything to save a dime up front, including greatly increasing costs down the line.
Of course, it isn’t only the public option that should be national in scope — until we wake up and move to a universal system without for-profit insurance companies, the experience of the rest of the world’s economically advanced countries argues strongly that we are never going to come up with a workable, cost-effective health care program that covers everyone. Since we’re currently headed in exactly the opposite direction, I’m pessimistic about health care in the US.
The Raven
Thank you, Doug. This bears saying, until people hear it. When Atrios, Daily Kos, or Firedoglake start talking up Trotsky, Mao, or Stalin, or at least Chomsky or Jerry Mander (yes, that’s his real name) I’ll believe they are far left. On the other hand, people like Glen Beck and Grover (the graduated income tax is as bad as the Holocaust) Norquist (yes, he really said it, on NPR’s Fresh Air, October 2, 2003) are, in fact, far right. The asymmetry is significant; the US media have a skewed idea of the political spectrum, and it has been communicated to the vast majority of the public.
In the interest of setting the record straight, I offer again the Raven’s political spectrum (if someone starts talking about two-dimensional measures, I shall stab them with my beak): Far Right: Grover Norquist; Moderate Right: Eugene Volokh; (Measured) Center: Josh Marshall; Moderate Left: Jane Hamsher; Far Left: Noam Chomsky. See, for instance, Media Matters report The Progressive Majority on the actual policy stances of the public. All mainstream media discourse takes place between moderate right and measured center, and it is only in this sense that Obama or the Democratic “centrists” are centrist: they are in the center of the discourse allowed by the US political mass consciousness, not the actual center of political discourse. Atrios, Daily Kos, and Firedoglake, on the other hand, fall between measured center and moderate left–one can only make them out as far left if one ignores the actual far left: anarchists like Chomsky and deep greens like Mander.
Liberty60
@KG:
Fair point, but actually, this election cycle, the biggest issue IS the New Deal: banking regulation, Social Security, even the basic premise of government involvement in the private sector is being debated.
Although issues change, we do swing through cycles of populism vs. wealthy elite,to other periods of managerial wonkishness, and back again.
IMHO, this is a good time for the Dems to rediscover their populist roots and defend the premises of the New Deal.
And if someone has a better set of rhetoric to advance the principles of egalitarianism, a better strategy for supporting the poor and elderly, well, I am all for it. But lets not denigrate or be embarrassed by the rhetoric I quoted above; it still rings true in my ears.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
So your proof that I’m wrong and this doesn’t work long-term is a single election less than a year after the ACA was signed into law? What’s your metric for “long-term,” three months? Six?
Given that our entire system, from top to bottom, is based on for-profit health care, I don’t think there was much choice. Unless you were prepared to nationalize every hospital, every doctor’s office, every pharmacy, every drug company, and every home health company, the for-profit aspect of health care was going to remain in the system. Having nonprofit insurance does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of (to use only one example) for-profit hospitals.
We hopefully will be able to slowly transition the system from for-profit to nonprofit but, again, it will require changing every aspect of our current healthcare system, not just the manner in which the for-profit providers get paid.
Mnemosyne
@Triassic Sands:
Right now, insurance companies are not allowed to sell policies across state lines, so (for example) Blue Cross of California can only compete with the other insurers authorized to sell insurance in California and can’t bring their weight to bear based on their operations in other states. Since the insured population is already restricted to the population of each state and can’t be accessed by companies as nationwide populations, I don’t think your scenario is plausible.
My dealbreaker for the ACA would have been if it had allowed insurance companies to sell across state lines, because it would have created exactly the problem you’re worried about and we would have had a race to the bottom as states competed to have the least number of restrictions on insurance companies to lure their business to their state. Fortunately, that did not happen, and we don’t have to worry about, say, Alabama becoming the South Dakota of health insurance companies.
Massachusetts is the 14th most populous state, and yet they haven’t had too much trouble implementing their own version of the public option, Commonwealth Care. I’m not sure why you think that they are somehow an outlier and other states will not be able to do the same.
Mnemosyne
I hate moderation. Especially when I didn’t use any forbidden words.
(pouts)
General Stuck
@Dollared:
LOL, nice try dude. You learned nothing from Dougj’s post, except to pour on more bullshit from that clown soapbox you stand on.
AxelFoley
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
LOL, I see what you did there.
AxelFoley
@Kenneth:
*pats Kenneth on the head*
That’s nice, son. Now be a good little boy and go run along and play in traffic.
Sasha
This is what it comes down to:
When torture is normalized and accepted as a “mainstream right” position, any sane and/or humane position will seem “far left” in comparison.
Sasha
@Maxwel:
He spoke against the military-industrial complex. He’d be blasted as an America-hating Communist who wants a weak USA.
celiadexter
Having been a student and sometimes an activist in Ann Arbor from ’67-’74, I can remember what “far left” really is. We had people who believed that “liberal” meant a sellout to the right. We had people who believed that anything short of violent revolution was cooptation. We had people who had a problem with freedom of expression because it represented “repressive tolerance” (if you read enough Marcuse, it almost starts to make sense until you come back to reality). SDS, the first organization I joined, had a schism in ’69 between Progressive Labor (Maoists) and the Jesse James Gang (Days of Rage) and Radical Caucus (Trotskyists). There were still Stalinists (CPUSA) around and some folks took them seriously. Those of us who thought of ourselves as Democratic socialists (I believe the term may have been coined by Michael Harrington) were dismissed as “conservatives”. Anyone who thought the 2 parties were anything but “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” was a hopeless case. I’m not an apologist for these folks, although I flirted with some of their ideas, but they were actually various stripes of far left. The most liberal Democrats holding office, or the people at this site or (for instance) Steve Benen or Kevin Drum or Rachel Maddow, are common-sense liberals. Obama is a moderate-liberal. Anyone thinking they’re far left doesn’t know what he/she is talking about and surely hasn’t read history.
mclaren
I’ve been called a “far left Marxist” on this forum for suggesting policies put in place during the Eisenhower administration: 90% top marginal tax rates, an excess profits tax on corporations, massive infrastructure spending, massive spending on basic science and higher education.
mclaren
@celiadexter:
To follow up on that — I’ve hung around some of these people. They still exist. The real far left guys are the Maoists and anarchists. These are guys who don’t just talk about controlling corporations, they’re going for the full deal — get rid of private property entirely. Abolish government. Make everything into collectives. Eliminate money from society. Everything turns into a co-op or a share or a flop.
We’re talking about folks whose idea of a home is a squat in a condemned building with stolen electricity. And the weird thing is, they kind of have a point, because slowly but surely everything is becoming free. These people get their broadband wifi from free wifi cafes and they download all their music and their movies on linux laptops off bittorrent. They use GNU open source software and everything is shared. I mean, these are people who share stuff like iPhone apps constantly updated to show the best restaurant dumpsters for freegan food. They are seriously off the grid, living without currency and using time banks instead of money. Their big deal is solar and deep cycle marine batteries and inverters to charge their cell phones and laptops so they can stay completely off the grid.
That’s the far left. Not Eisenhower Republicans like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Even Dennis Kucinich is just a slightly less extreme conservative compared to the anarchists today and the ultra-green-whole-earth Maoists.
Ronbo
@Mnemosyne: I’d say you are on a vacation from reality. Get real, we are tired of your constant push to the right. If your slurs and attacks are a vacation, I’d hate to see you in your “job”. I still get the vibe that you are being paid to “push” this conversation away from reality. At a quarter a pop, this comment would take you up to about $20.
I only see a nickel’s worth of sense.
Ronbo
@Glinda: @Glinda: Glinda, I said Issue by Issue. Yes, people don’t identify as “liberals”. Thirty years of slurring the word seems to be effective. But on issues – people select the solution from the left. You may recall the recent poll where people selected from the balance of social involvement between the USA and Sweden. The vast majority said they’d rather see the Swedish model.
I’m not one to say “we are #1” when we are at or near the bottom of the socialized world – regarding: education, healthcare and quality of life. But on Issues, people invariably select the solution from the left. Single-payer health care is the clear choice of the American Public. They love Social Security. Unless you, Glinda, know differently? Perhaps you can frame the question to get a different answer. Can you find a single issue where the “right” tops the left?
If I’m wrong, I will fess up and admit it. Will you?
The Raven
@celiadexter: @mclaren: @Ronbo: Yes. Thank you.
The pure ignorance of politics that can lead to describing Atrios, Kos, and Hamsher as “far left” astonishes and scares me, and never mind that I was just as ignorant 10 years ago.
BTW, on the term “democratic socialism,” we have Orwell using the term in “Why I Write,” which was published in 1946, when Harrington (says Wikipedia) would have been 18. So it’s probably older than Harrington. Orwell also says (in “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” published in the same year): “Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality, and internationalism.”
xian
@Ronbo: per a later thread, your claim that “Nearly 40% of my premium goes directly into the healthcare company’s pocket – NOT into healthcare” is about to be subjected to the 80-85% standard of the new healthcare law.