Does the moderate left in the US need a more radical left

Great Debates
1

In the book ‘predictably irrational’ Dan Ariely talks about how some of our decisions are based on comparisons with other alternatives, and in some situations it is best to have a decoy alternative to make the ideal alternative seem more valuable. An example is he doesn’t expect you to know how much a 6 cylinder car costs, but he expects you to know it costs more than the 4 cylinder model.

An example he gives is assume you are a Realtor selling a house. You want to sell house B instead of A. So what you do is you find a house that is identical to B, but has something wrong with it, and try to sell it for the same price as house B. So call the decay house house C.

House A costs 110k, House B costs 140k and House C costs 140k. House C is virtually identical to house B except it has a leaky roof and faulty plumbing. When the customer sees house C he may think ‘house B is a real bargain’ because it is like he is getting house C with a ‘free’ upgrade of a better roof and better plumbing.

Another issue related to this topic is keeping out a threat. One of the arguments for having a strong labor movement is that other employers will be forced to offer better wages and benefits to keep the unions out.

Assume you have two employers (employer A and employer B) and employer A has a union. The wages and benefits are slightly higher. As a result employer B becomes afraid that his employees will form a union, so he tries to cut them off at the pass by offering higher wages and benefits to his (non-union) employees. This is how social security was started in Germany, it was an attempt to placate the left to prevent the more radical left from gaining power.

The miracle of the invisible hand. If you don’t give people what they want, they will find someone who will. And if the ones who will give them what they want are a huge threat to you, you’d better placate those people.

So it seems in the US the moderate left (of which I consider myself a member) has been portrayed as the radical left by the media and conservatives. The fact that I believe in single payer, government programs, progressive taxes and a strong union movement gets me compared to communists. However, if we had real communists in the mainstream, then I wouldn’t look so bad. In fact I’d look more moderate and mainstream.

Which brings me to another political topic. The more insane and radical the GOP becomes, the more sane the old radicals become. Newt Gingrich was a radical once. However now he is ‘moderate’ because he is trying to restrain the Palin and Teabag branch of the GOP (who are the new insane radicals). However Gingrich was considered a radical by the standards of Goldwater, who hated the contemporary GOP. However in the 1960s Goldwater was considered a radical, which is partly why LBJ won with such massive majorities in 1964. So Goldwater was a radical in the 1960s and was opposed by the moderates back then. Then in the 1990s Gingrich was a radical and was opposed by the moderate Goldwater. Then in 2008 Palin was a radical and was opposed by the comparatively moderate Gingrich. I’m sure in 2025 the GOP will have a wing of people who look and act like Cletus from the simpsons, except they have swastika tattoos and carry guns. Compared to them, Palin will appear moderate.

So how radical a political position becomes is in part due to comparing it to other political position. Bill O’Reilly is fairly rational and sane compared to Palin. And sadly in 15 years Palin will probably be sane and rational compared to the GOP of 2025.

But anyway, if we had a truly radical left wing movement in the US (legitimate Marxism) it’d help more moderate leftists social democrats like myself. We’d appear more sane, moderate and mainstream (in comparison) and people in power would try to appease us to keep us from supporting the truly radical leftists.

Then again, the radical branch can alienate tons of voters from that entire point of view. Palin may may Gingrich look sane, but she also makes fence sitters terrified of the GOP. So who knows.

2

How is Goldwater considered a moderate? He’s still Mr. Conservative. Goldwater was against the changes from the New Deal. He fought against the expansion of the federal government. He opposed labor unions and the welfare state. He was a libertarian before there was a Libertarian Party. The only positions that Goldwater held (to my knowledge) that Conservatives today reject was his support for abortion and gay rights.

Nixon was the moderate in Goldwater’s time. Heck, if you want to look at policies during Nixon’s whole presidency and compare them to the whole presidency of Bill Clinton, Clinton is to the right of Nixon.

3

You’ve got to be pretty radical to make Pelosi appear more mainstream.

And you have to find alot of those radicals to make them appear more than just a way out fringe.

4

As a fiscally conservative, socially liberal mostly moderate (IMO) I’ve seen the desires of the right and left up close, and both (obviously) consider themselves as perfectly sane and rational within their sphere. So did the left of the 60’s and 70’s which had as many huge fuck ups as they had successes. The right’s huge power surge of the 80’s and 90’s was to some degree a reaction against the arrogance and presumption of the 60’s and 70’s left. The left of 2010 seems (so far) to have learned some humility from that lesson and the right of 2010 seems to be borderline schizophrenic.

Beyond all this there is not much appetite in the US for extreme radical positions and using (hypothetically) one as a scare tactic would drive more people right, not less left.

5

If you’re saying the political spectrum in the USA is out of whack, it won’t be a surprise to too many - something like totally mainstrean social-democratic parties in Europe would be considered more left than most Americans who consider themselves ‘left’.

You have zero balance and even centre-ist voices have been largely shut down by the controlling media. The centre is slightly cuckoo ‘left’ now in the USA.

6

Boy, that Pelosi is really out there, isn’t she? What a whack job she is.

7

:rolleyes: The American Left-to-the-left-of-Pelosi is at any rate less of a way-out fringe than your Teabaggers.

8

The radical left gets plenty of attention. Michael Moore is about as radical as they come, and he’s a famous filmmaker.

9

Thats the problem. Moore isn’t a radical leftist. He is a social democrat/green. They are not radical. Liberals and unions make up the base of the democratic party. And Moore is comfortable walking in and identifying with both circles.

Radical leftists are the ones calling for armed insurrection against the government so we can have a communist takeover of all private industry and abolish private ownership.

Moore just wants single payer health care, energy reform and a strong union movement, and he wants it done via the democratic process.

10

As said, Michael Morre is dead centre, a social democrat, not remotely radical on any issue - in any other country on earth.

11

America’s not any other country on earth, though, and the fact that Moore might not be a radical leftist in, say, Sweden, doesn’t mean he’s not a radical leftist in the US.

12

After reading the title, I thought “Absolutely!”. The USA needs a good alternative government instead of the current choice of Conservative, Very Conservative, and Lunatic anti-education conservative.

I take the point made in the OP that you can have the centre and your perception of what is normal skewed by what is available. Where I would differ is that you really need two groups - a true left who constantly calls out the Democrats for their cowardice in failing to implement social justice policies, and a decoy “extreme left” which adopts crazy policy positions such as multi-lateralism in foreign relations, a living wage and universal health care.

13

Then please tell us in what way you would describe him as “radical”.

14

The real radicals on the left today don’t get much coverage at all, because they don’t focus on hot-button, sound-bite issues or represent narrow interest groups.

They tend to be academics, usually lower-level ones, who write essays that can’t easily get published. They’re about things like how we could get along in a non-work economy if the jobs don’t come back, or how we can re-tool Marxism to get rid of its industrial age assumptions. They’re troubling to many of us, because they tend to rationally challenge assumptions of faith. Some of us don’t even know how troubled we are by such challenges, because anything that requires in-depth reading to understand is obviously just intellectual masturbation.

Today, the radicals are mostly quiet, because this is not a great time for people who base action on considered thought instead of money or rage.

15

Ok, then Rush Limbaugh is a moderate Republican.

I really don’t see the controversy here. I see the radical left out there. I don’t see them being hidden anywhere.

If Michael Moore is mainstream left, then Rush Limbaugh is mainstream right and it cuts both ways, that both sides see the moderates of the opposing factions as being radicals.

Bill Ayers helped fundraise for Barack Obama early in his career. Is that not the radical left? Setting a bomb off in the Pentagon is not ‘radical’? How does one define radical under these extremely specific criteria?

Hardly anyone espouses hardline Communism anymore because of its near universal failure world-wide. And those who do espouse it generally have trouble articulating their viewpoints intelligently in the face of this evidence. They come across as fundamentalists no less blinkered than the most rabid of fundie Christians.

16

True. A radical leftist in Iran is not the same as a radical leftist in Finland.

However Moore’s opinions are not ‘radical’ or out of the mainstream. Opinion polls finds single payer health care, progressive taxes and a strong middle class to be mainstream opinions.

Radicals are the ones whose opinions only appeal to a fringe. By that definition the mainstream of the GOP is radical and the fringe of the democratic party is mainstream.

Very few people, according to polls, want the same wall street bankers who almost drove the global economy into a depression to get a tax cut. But the majority of republicans do. They want to cut the taxes those same bankers pay (income, estate, capital gains, dividend)

However over 50% (including over 50% of doctors) support single payer health care, which is something Moore devoted an entire film to.

17

What about 9/11 Conspiracy twaddle, and a strict anti-2nd amendment stance?

18

Two relevant articles, one from the perspective of the radical left, the other from the moderate left:

“Leftists, Liberals – and Losers? How and why progressives must unite for real change,” by G. William Domhoff.

“A Progressive Marriage? What Democrats can learn from Republicans about managing the menage a trois within the party,” by Michael Lind.

I think Lind actually oversimplifies the picture, BTW:

On the right, there are at least five main factions: In addiction to the libertarians, the neoliberals, and the theocons/social-religious conservatives, there are the business-interest conservatives or bizcons and the nativist-isolationist paleocons. The paleocons, most visibly represented at present from Pat Buchanan, differ from the theocons mainly in emphasis – they share the same cultural values, but mainly they are economic populists who hate Wall Street as much as Washington. Paleocons also differ from theocons in being implacably hostile to U.S. support for Israel, “Christian Zionism” notwithstanding. The bizcons represent the established business interests and their sympathizers – big business interests, Wall Street, not Main Street. They are distinguishable from the ideological libertarians, who are hostile to regulation of business, but equally hostile to fat sweetheart no-bid contracts and government subsidies and bailouts of failed enterprises. The bizcons are the single most important faction on the right – not electorally, but because they have substantially bankrolled the conservative movement and its organizations and think-tanks. See The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. I should also mention the White Nationalist and the militia/“Patriot” movements, who have been marginal within the conservative movement (if they can be said to be within it at all), but who are now making a serious effort to piggyback on the immigration issue to reach the mainstream; how successful that can be remains to be seen. Certainly they already enjoy some Boolean intersection with the paleocons, FWIW.

On the left, Lind equates old-style New Deal liberals with progressives. In my view, that is an error. In current American political discourse, a progressive is actually something well to the left of “liberal” (which is in turn well to the left of “neoliberal”) and well to the right of “socialist,” as I argued in this thread. (Those Lind characterizes as “ideological Greens” (and implicitly mischaracterizes as Luddites – see here) are merely a faction of the progressives with an added emphasis on environmentalism.) Domhoff sees the distinction clearly enough, if Lind does not: “Liberals [i.e., neoliberals and New Deal liberals both] support gradual changes through education, lobbying and elections to curb the worst excesses of our capitalist system and provide greater social benefits through government. Leftists [i.e., progressives and socialists both] argue for more radical changes to the status quo.”

19

Well, my main point was that you need to judge Americans by American standards and not international standards. But, as for Moore, I dunno. He has praised socialism and said that capitalism has failed, is un-American, and undemocratic. That’s hardly the position of either of the two major parties, and I don’t think you’d find many Americans who agree with him on it.

20

And that is exactly wrong. We do have to live in the world, you know. Is everybody out of step but Sammy?