We have been a hybrid which includes socialism in it for decades. The so called socialists or more accurately “democratic socialists”, who are in office now are looking towards the scandinavian countries successes with socialist programs. We already know they work, and we are already there anyway in terms of socialism. Not to mention the grotesque failure of “trickle down economics” for decades as well.
I think that the main “racing towards socialism” meme comes from the effect of having a mad president and having younger pols taking some action against the abuses of the levers of capitalism under such a person.
Let’s face it: dt is the emergency at all times. If it ever slows down he fixes that very quickly, by tweet or worse. The rest of the country including dem politicians are just dealing with it.
I oppose Socialism but, at the same time, it is the case that Sweden is not Hell on Earth and, you might note, there is a difference between President and God-Emperor of the Planet. The former has to deal with a few hundred people - a goodly number from Texas - to get anything done, unless we’re talking about where to send troops to and how much to budget for them.
To a large extent, you’re better off to just focus on the question of where they’d send the troops and what budget they’d ask for them. Everything else, really, is meant to be left up to the states and generally is. Just vote for states-rightists in the House and Senate.
When the alternative is a party hellbent on racing towards fascism, the Democrats don’t look so bad at all. Particularly as what the US right-wing consider “radical socialism” is “basic center-left politics” for most of the Western world.
In a country with public education, Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, progressive income taxes, Social Security, and interstates, the fight against socialism is long since over. “Socialism” is just a bugaboo, a scare word thrown up by people in lieu of arguing against the merits of a specific proposal.
What does this mean? No, seriously, what is a “moderate”? Someone who sees the Trump administration’s position of “climate change is a chinese hoax”, the left accurately describing climate change as an existential threat to modern civilization and thinks, “Hmm, maybe a minor carbon tax will help”? Is this somehow “moderate”? Because a minor carbon tax will not solve the problem, and in the face of the consequences of climate change, not solving the problem seems pretty fucking extreme to me.
That doesn’t sound like a “moderate” position. That’s an extremely unpopular right-wing position. Nearly 3 in 4 Americans support a gun registry. 61% support banning high-capacity magazines; 57% support banning “assault weapons”.
So you’re looking for a candidate you can vote for. They have to be “moderates” in most regards, but also favor an extremely unpopular right-wing position on guns. Hmm. And that’s what it’ll take for you to vote for a democrat. Sorry, “Democrat”.
Now, not to say that you’re being disingenuous, you may be entirely candid here, but I will say that it’s noteworthy there’s an entire right-wing ecosystem of people writing articles with exactly this kind of premise. “Gosh, I’d love to vote against Trump, but…” They are, much like you, by and large lifetime republicans. Occasionally, they’re misrepresented as “swing voters” when they are, in fact, hardline Trump supporters (The New York Times does this with the same group of hardline Trump supporters pretty often). It’s also worth noting that these concerned republican voices who would love to vote for democrats if the democrats weren’t so darn radical seemingly have no qualms about Donald Trump’s radicalism, dishonesty, use of the government for personal profit, et cetera. In fact, Jamelle Bouie mocked this exact kind of nonsense in an article that was more a subtweet of his fellow opinion columnist Bret Stephens than anything else.
But forget all that. Let’s assume you’re being entirely candid here, and you really are looking for a democratic candidate you could support, but have certain wants and needs.
Here is why you should vote for a democrat: because the alternative is Donald Trump.
That’s it. That’s all you should need. That’s all any decent human being who is even remotely up-to-date on modern politics should need. Trump is not some normal candidate.
You should vote for a democrat because…
The alternative is a president who is advised by (multiple!) neo-nazis and implementing policies they support.
The alternative is a president who is, at the urging of said neo-nazis, running concentration camps where tens of thousands of children are being separated from their families (and many are being forcibly adopted out - stolen from their families by an adoption agency linked to Trump’s SecEd).
The alternative is a president who is currently being impeached because he withheld aid to an ally in order to execute a personal bribe to further his political campaign with it.
The alternative is a president who lies, constantly, about matters both large and small, from the impact of his tax plan to the number of people at his inauguration to the size of his hands. A president who clearly is not mentally well, and who shows many serious signs of significant mental decline. A president who gets his talking points directly from spending hours every day watching Fox News.
(If any of this shit sounds almost cartoonishly bad… Well, yeah, it is, and I’m wondering if that’s not part of the point. Call it the “Matilda” principle. People might have believed Trunchbull spanking or hitting kids. Nobody would believe that she put them in “the chokey” or tossed a girl out the window by her pigtails. But it’s real, and we cannot ignore it. Everything I’ve brought up here is well-documented and extremely serious.)
It’s not a question of “will this democrat be better than a random republican”. It’s “will this republican be better than the kleptocratic, deeply corrupt, neo-nazi-affiliated, bottom-of-the-barrel bullshit we currently have on display”.
And the fact that you look at that and say, “Ehhhhh, but what if the other guy will [del]take away[/del] slightly regulate my expensive murder toys?!” should be read as nothing less than a deeply damning enditement of your political views. With all due respect, fuck your guns, there is more important shit going on.
This is, of course, assuming that you’re being entirely candid with us, unlike people like Bret Stephens or organizations like the National Review. And even if you are… Sorry, fam. Your views are deeply unpopular and there’s no real reason to cater to people like you, people still on the fence as to whether or not we should vote out the guy who keeps building concentration camps and is being advised by neo-nazis on how to do it, when it comes to who we should run. If your response to Trump is to whine, “If only the democrats would run a candidate who, all things considered, is basically just what a moderate republican was 5 years ago*”, maybe you should build grassroots support for a republican primary challenger. Don’t expect us to water down our candidate looking for your fleeting and questionable support. Instead, we’re going to go looking for the people who are disenfranchised and disenchanted - say, the people who aren’t particularly political, but are also really sick of needing their children to undergo live shooter drills. Again, when polled, democratic policies are vastly more popular than republican policies. Tacking towards the center does not help us here.
Also, while you may be being entirely honest with us and this is a good-faith attempt to move away from Trump… even outside the pundit class, most of the time you see this kind of framing, it’s not really honest. Rather, it’s Trump supporters justifying their vote to themselves. “Oh, sure, Trump is bad, but I considered voting Dem if only they’d act more moderate [here meaning: like republicans], and they refused, so I guess we’re stuck with Trump.” To the point where it’s basically a meme. (And, y’know, an explicit call of far-right propagandists on chan boards, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.)
TL;DR: anyone not already moved to vote for a democrat by how awful Trump is probably isn’t really looking for more convincing, and there simply are no good reasons to offer them any ground on that. Their positions are unpopular, and with good reason, and claims that they need more convincing are usually but not always dishonest attempts to frame a narrative or absolve themselves of any guilt they might feel in voting for Donald Trump. I can’t speak to the OP’s intentions, but I can say that if he wants a “mostly moderate” person who is an opponent to gun control, he should consider pushing for a primary challenge to Donald Trump, or, failing that, accept that sometimes, there are things that are more important than whether or not you are allowed to own the shiniest, most effective murder toys. And if that’s a red line for you, but you won’t draw a red line on all the shit Trump is doing, your politics are fucked and your morals are cruel and evil.
*Note: your estimation of what a republican was 5 years ago is probably fairly far removed from the reality of what a republican was 5 years ago. It was always pretty nasty.
I’m not the first person to note that when given the choice between socialism and fascism, capitalists tend to side with the latter.
This is actually kind of exactly the sort of thing I was mentioning in my above post when talking about Trump supporters justifying their vote to themselves. “Gosh, Trump is bad, but y’know, the opposition is SOCIALISTS!!1!, so I absolutely have to vote against that.”
I have no doubt that octopus genuinely believes that. And if the line was, instead, that you absolutely have to vote against the democrats because, I dunno, they are pushing for infanticide, I’m sure he’d genuinely believe that, too. It’s not true, obviously, but that doesn’t matter. For the purpose of this kind of discussion it never does. The democrats are bad because <insert reason here>, therefore I am justified in voting for Trump, regardless of what bad things he does." It absolves you of guilt for doing something truly awful, and that’s what they’re looking for.
This sort of thing is dime-a-dozen in postmodern conservatism. Arguing against it as though these people were earnestly looking for a reason not to vote for Trump is a fool’s game. It is worth remembering that, in all my time here, I cannot recall octopus ever overtly opposing a Trump policy. I’ll leave any conclusions to be drawn from that to the reader.
(It also works as disturbingly effective propaganda when printed in the media for the old guard of democrats who lived through the Reagan era and are terrified that any step to the left will make their electorate abandon them en masse. That’s why you keep seeing dozens of copies of the same dumb op-ed - right-wingers in the media are doing this shit on purpose.)
Please don’t misrepresent my point of view. I don’t use socialism as a scare word. No more than others on this forum use fascism, with absolutely no pushback, as a scare word.
When I hear open borders and free everything it sounds like socialism to me. I’m not a fan. I’m also not a fan with claiming to be following the constitution yet ignoring every ‘troubling’ aspect of it when convenient to do so.
Anyways, rejection of the nutty far left would be very good for the long term health of your party and, more importantly, the country.
To attach on to my previous post: this guy supports Donald Trump. He does so and then proceeds to talk about the “nutty far left”. I have to ask - should we take someone who makes statements like that seriously when they say, “Yeah, I’d vote for the dems, IF…”
These statements are not earnest pleas for the democrats to “come back to the center”.
if you’ll notice, the OP was talking about voting third party as opposed to voting for Trump.
The only place you hear Dems being for open borders and free everything is on right-wing media, not the Democratic debate stage.
And as far as rejection of “the nutty far left,” I think AOC is a joke too; but the side of politics you hew to is determined to label every Democrat as being party of the nutty far left. Hillary Clinton – I mean, you can hardly imagine a more centrist, establishment Dem – was painted as an extreme left winger. You’ve got to agree that whatever her shortcomings, she is not a left winger, correct?
But that’s the thing: why is (a loose immigration policy labeled by its opponents as) “open borders”= “socialism”? By association with internationalism? So any policy other than right wing nationalism = “socialism”?
(Some months back Mitch McConnell pissed off a whole damn lot of Puerto Ricans of both parties by saying statehood for PR would be a win for socialism. Just more proof that it’s become a snarl word.)
I’ve voted for dems before. And yes I’d do so again. But not in support of the nutty far left. They are too dangerous. Biden ain’t so bad. Even if some of his stories are a bit goofy.
Is Hillary a left winger? By today’s standards? Probably not. Not far left by any means. She’d have been, aside from reshaping the judiciary, a better president than The Donald.
There’s a little irony in your accusing me of misrepresenting what you said, and then your saying that today you’re hearing about “open borders and free everything.” Neither of those ideas are remotely within the mainstream of political conversation in our country, and open borders have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. These examples are far better examples of “socialism” as a bugaboo than anything I would’ve been able to come up with.
But that’s pretty much what Trump said while standing in front of NRA and GOA conventions.
Then the moment something happened he started talking about all sorts of restrictions and got a bump stock ban via an illegal procedure.
I’ve always said that a truly pro-gun Democrat could beat the brains out of a Republican in a national election. But what the Democratic party consider pro-gun is not what gun issue voters consider pro-gun.
This is as far as I got in your wall of text You have no basis to call me a “lifetime republican”, and I take offense at falsely being labeled a Trump supporter. I typically vote a split ticket in most elections, often including third party candidates. I have never supported Donald Trump.
I find the OP funny. As horrific as Trump is, the democratic candidate has to pass a microscopic personality/politics test, otherwise he’ll vote for Trump?!
That’s like keeping Hitler and not voting for Winston Churchill because he smoked those stinky cigars. LOL