Moore made movies pointing out obvious inequities and failures of the establishment. Sicko compared the medical care in other countries with the screwed up care in America. How is that a radical left concept? He is just showing what America does wrong. The right makes money off the businesses he skewers. So they spend a lot of time attacking him as a radical lefty instead of defending there actions. For some people that works. Lets talk about Moore, not medical care. Lets talk about Moore not capitalism. The farther left you paint him, the more people will believe his ideas are not mainstream or true.
Generally when people say, ‘The rest of the world.’ What they mean is ‘Europe’. For some reason Leftists tend to be Europhiles except when making a point about the evils of colonialism. Comparing the US to Sweden is stupid because Sweden is a country with the population slightly bigger than New Jersey’s in a habitable area about the same size. Norway’s situation is more similar to Alaska’s where the oil rights help to sustain the country. Should we compare us to France with their sclerotic business culture where telecom employees kill themselves over demotions because the state run agency can’t downsize? How do we stack up against Britain with its perpetual slow-motion decline? And who wants Italy’s Mafioso corruption culture? Should we compare ourselves to countries like Poland that are suffering massive brain drain as their best and brightest move to England? Maybe Luxembourg which is a city-state that is largely driven by banking and old money assets distributed around Europe? What about Switzerland, a racist largely monoethnic insular banking state? Or maybe Spain where its boom times when unemployment is at the level it is today? What about Germany with its demographic collapse in process?
Or maybe when you said, ‘The World’, you meant Asia, with Japan’s poster-child of stagflation with a welfare state in crisis due to the greatest demographic collapse on Earth? Or Communist China? Are we more or less Liberal than China’s corporatist one-party oligarchy? How do we stack up against Thailand with its constant corruption and low level revolutions? Or India with its rigid caste system and crushing poverty?
Maybe you meant South America. Like Brazil with its massive difference between the rich and poor. Something Americans can barely comprehend. Or we could be like Colombia with its drug cartels. Or Venezuela with its top down market controls implemented by a capricious dictator? Maybe you meant Bolivia where the rights of the indigenous are highly important, but no one thought to build a reservoir to get water to La Paz and its sister cities? Argentina? Should we even talk about Paraguay with its inability to even police its own borders? The country that can’t even afford radar cover for a third of its state? Peru? Chile?
Maybe it was Mexico. Yes, that must be it. Its a Liberal Narco-Utopia south of the border. Or so I hear. More than 300 people killed in open warfare between drug cartels in the first weeks of January in Ciudad Juarez alone.
Yeah, we live in the world. We should really compare ourselves to the rest of the world and strive to emulate the nations of the world that are either worse off than we are, or who are too small to make a meaningful comparison.
Short memories. He made movies before Sicko.
I certainly agree that we have to live in the world, but when you look at somebody’s beliefs, you need to look at their beliefs in the context of their culture, because someone’s culture shapes and determines what beliefs are acceptable for him to hold, and what’s unthinkable.
I do agree with mswas that most of the time when people say, “the rest of the world”. they mean Europe. But I’d also say, I think, that it’s not that the US spectrum is to the right of Europe but just that it’s narrower than Europe on both the right and the left. There’s not an active Communist Party, but there’s not an active Fascist Party either. America was founded by classical liberals, and classical liberalism is really the only ideology that took hold here.
Well it’s classical Liberalism vs Down Home Borderer Conservatism.
It’s not a question of “Americans”, it is a question of people being exposed to unfettered information.
The issue in the USA is that the political aspirations of a huge proportion of the electorate are not even being acknowledged by either the politcial parties or the mainstream media - huge swathes are being effectively disenfranchised for want of representation.
Broadly, Moore speaks from that demographic, and it’s a huge chunk of the electorate.
Well, by that definition, Palin and crowd are moderates too, right? The extremists would be the hardcore militia types.
Your whole thesis is flawed, because you’re looking at history through your own filter, which apparently isn’t very accurate.
The Republican party hasn’t shifted to the right. The Republicans in 1994 ran on a campaign that included abolishing the Department of Education, de-fanging the FDA and cutting the federal register in half. Large blocs of Republicans then were advocating a flat tax. They had a list of federal agencies they wanted to gut or eliminate. They favored a balanced budget amendment.
Ronald Reagan famously said, “Government is not part of the solution. Government is part of the problem.” His goal was to cut the size of government dramatically - and this was a government that, other than the military, was already much smaller than today’s.
Hell, even Clinton said “The Era of Big Government is Over”. Does that sound like something you’d hear from today’s Democrats? For that matter, is that something you’re even likely to hear Republicans say? George Bush presided over a huge expansion of government, and set up all kinds of government programs to solve problems. He dramatically increased the Department of Education. He created the Department of Homeland Security.
Hell, Republicans aren’t even talking about repealing Roe v Wade anymore. Most of them were for a stimulus - only somewhat smaller than the Democrats’ version. I’m not seeing the radical shift to the right you think exists.
Since when is “a strong middle class” a unique position to the left? You realize both parties lay claim to that, right?
And while most people say they approve of progressive taxation, the question is how much? Do you think you could get majority approval for 60% taxes on the highest tax bracket? 70%? Where do you think the line is?
What you WILL find is that people tend to favor taxes that mostly impact other people. Where you will find opposition to progressive taxes is when people feel they are so high that they are destroying innovation and wealth creation and thereby affecting their own lives. Back when progressive taxes were up in the 60-70% range, Reagan ran on flattening the tax curve and won in a landslide.
This is just flat out untrue. You guys on the left keep repeating this, and I keep correcting it, but you don’t listen. In fact, 40% of Americans call themselves ‘conservative’. Only 19% call themselves ‘liberal’. Unless you want to make the case that the fringe of the Democratic party is still ‘conservative’, and that somehow the mainstream of the Republican party is to the right of ‘conservative’, you don’t have a leg to stand on.
Republicans also enjoy a 3% margin over Democrats in declared party preference, and the large bloc of independents now break almost 2-1 for Republicans.
So you have it exactly backwards. The mainstream of the GOP is exactly where the majority of the country is (along with the blue dog Democrats), and liberal wing of the Democratic Party (Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Boxer, etc) are part of the 20% fringe. In fact, this is exactly what’s hurting the Democratic party - their leaders are from political safe, very left districts. That’s put them in power over time, even though they do not represent anything close to the mainstream. That’s why Democrats are losing voters like crazy.
Oh, come on! What, bankers are the only people who have income, estates, capital gains and dividends?
This is nothing by naked populist pandering. Yes, bankers are the bogeyman right now. Yes, you can find lots of people who want to punish them. You can find them on the right, too. But to characterize a desire to cut capital gains and dividend taxes as “a tax cut for bankers” is ridiculous. The biggest beneficiaries of such cuts are institutional investors, which includes pension funds and personal investment holdings of the middle and upper middle classes.
So why pick Sweden? What not Germany? The American economy is growing slower than the EU’s for the last couple of decades, despite all the “socialism” that so scares the right in this country.
BTW, a new Washington Post Poll asked people the following question:
The result: 58% said they wanted smaller government with fewer services, and only 38% said they wanted larger government with more services.
The same poll asked people to identify themselves as liberal, moderate, or conservative. The result was 25% liberal, 34% moderate, and 38% conservative.
You’re just going to have to face the fact that you live in a center-right country, where most people are skeptical of big government and conservative or moderate in outlook. And that the real liberals are actually a fairly small percentage of the country.
And you know, these numbers will probably get bigger for conservatives. I’m actually quite surprised tha they are as high as they are after 8 years of Bush leading into a major recession. If the Democrats continue to govern from the left, and the economy doesn’t make a dramatic turnaround, you’re going to see a majority of the country calling itself conservative and ‘liberal’ will once again be a dirty word that no one wants to claim for themselves.
I addressed Germany also.
But the EUs economy is growing largely because of several boom states like Ireland that had a lot of room for growth. And there has been a creation of economic opportunity in the recent assimilation of the European states into a cohesive whole.
The point isn’t better or worse, and not merely a matter of economic growth, but a matter of similarity, and whether or not it is rational to try and implement European policies in America.
Basically the left/right spectrum in the two polities are very different. Europe’s Conservative strain is much more ethnocentric than America’s for instance.
I don’t know that I believe that. And the reason that I don’t know that I believe that is that if there is a large chunk of the population with positions that aren’t being represented by existing politicians, then politicians are going to come along that represent these people’s views. If a significant portion of the population supports puppy kicking, politicians are going to start lacing up their Nikes.
Nonsense. The only factions among American conservatives that are even theoretically non-ethnocentric are the neocons and the libertarians. And they are not very convincing about it.
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Ah, a stirring refutation.
Like it or not, the racism and religious bigotry of the Right in America is well known and obvious.
Actually, it was more of a refutation that such a ridiculous statement warrented. personally, I’d have spared the hamsters that last rolley-eye, since BG’s assertion wasn’t worth the that much strain on the system.
This is no more valid than similar broad brush pictures of the Left in America. There are a lot of different stripes of conservative in the US…only one part of it is of the quasi-religious/racist type. And trying to paint them ALL with that brush basically shows how out of touch some on the left actually are.
As to the OP, I think mswas and Sam have done a bang up job of answering it already. I’ll just say that I don’t believe the moderate left in the US would be helped by more radical (by which I presume the OP means more prominent) left wing movement. I think the moderate left, like the moderate right, are doing fine in the US, since they are already well positioned near the US center. Where they should be. Where the majority of people in this country are.
Of course, my own position there may bias me towards such a conclusion…
-XT
Garbage. The American right seethes with bigotry, racist and otherwise. However much admitting it offends your desire to defend them. But you can’t, which is why the rolleyes.
In other words, reactionary, ignorant, bigoted near-fascists and religious lunatics.
By the standard you are using, the Nazis and Stalinists were moderate since they dominated Germany and the USSR. Majority and moderate are not synonyms.
And the American Left seethes with communists and hard core socialists who are all also eco-fascists want to destroy capitalism, destroy industry (well, that and seize it and the other means of production for the good of the people), and take us back to a totalitarian neo-luddite paradise of good workers and peasants, living clean and happy on the land, and watched over by the benevolent left wing elites who’s only motivation is…
gag I can’t even keep up such a silly broad brush caricature with a straight face. Ironically, you and others on this board do the reverse and, sadly, you actually mean it.
-XT
[empasis mine]
Right. The corporate media has defined progressives, those who recognize that society has a debt to all it’s members as radicals and anarchists and while defining conservatives, those who favor a minimal central govt bound in fiscal responsibilty along with a peaceful foreign policy, as militaristic, profiteering assholes abroad and not much different at home.
Wes, the problem is not that progressives need a nastier straw man to make us look good. We are the true conservatives and always have been. The problem is that the Social Darwinists, let’s call them what they are, reactionaries (just say no), have not realized that a species equipped with self-consciousness and hands will either develop a conscience (recognize we are a part of the global community) or destory [sic] the planet. Character is destiny.
Thank you very much.
Actually, “ethnocentrism” is a much broader concept than racism or religious bigotry.