“The theory or system of the ownership and operation of the means of production and distribution by society or the community rather than by private individuals, with all members of society or the community sharing in the work and the products.”
Most of your complaints have nothing to do with socialism. Even “socialized medicine” is mostly capitalistic in most phases of its operation. Governments write checks to for-profit hospitals, owned by stockholders, which dispense drugs from stockholder-owned companies. The society doesn’t own most of it, it just passes around money.
Reproductive freedom is not part of socialism, unless you can show us a governmentally owned abortion clinic. Women’s clinics are entirely private, not socialistic.
Gun control has nothing to do with societal ownership.
Rather than make some rude guesses about where you get your political positions, I’ll suggest that you do some independent study. You have picked up some misinformation from somebody. Use your own brain.
I have a minor in Political Science and I’m a 3.8 GPA student who used to get my own subscription to Foreign Affairs magazine. I know what Socialism is in the strictest sense. I used the term too loosely to include all of those commonly associated with the agenda of “the Left” . Issues such as gun control and reproductive freedom (read abortion on demand) have long been major issues for the Left at least in America. Perhaps you can suggest a better term that would denote the nexus of issues common to those who count themselves my opponents on these subjects…
I refer you to your own academic credentials in your OP in this thread.
Reproductive freedom has long been a major issue for most Americans. Among its supporters are Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, and the daughters of George W. Bush. The elder President Bush was also a supporter until he decided to run for President. It has found support among many conservatives.
I don’t recall a time in our history when there has ever been a right to “abortion on demand” at just any time during the pregnancy.
Gee, I don’t know, Roland. Maybe I dreamed it, but I could swear that every state in this country with the exception of Arizona voted for the liberal Presidential candidate in 1964. The Southland was just as blue as New England. Didn’t you study Pendulum Theory in PoliSci?
Roland, for someone with such high politico-academic credentials I’m surprised that you perceive the US as the norm, and the rest of the democratic world as odd. I really think you need to adopt the perspective that the US’s political right-wingedness is the unusual political model. E.g., a national health service is seen by the majority of the industrialised world (albeit not in “socialist” China) as a fundamental right - and I believe an argument can indeed be made that it is indeed socialistic, but no more so to most of us who enjoy such a thing as, say, governments building roads or providing the police or an army.
As for the trends you describe, well, despite what you may believe, the EU has conservative fiscal reform as its mandate, not profligacy: e.g. to join the euro currency, governments have to cut back on welfare, not increase it. To join the EU similar requirements exist - that the proportion of GDP spent on welfare must be below a certain level.
You seem to be saying that the world is getting more ‘left wing’, ie socially liberal, and economically less free market. I agree that the trend over the last few decades has been towards social liberalism. There are more democracies than there were, and in democracies there are moves towards gay rights etc. Even people living in autocratic regimes can often watch satellite broadcasts of independent media like Al-Jazeera etc.
However saying that the world has been getting more socialist is plainly wrong. The UK has moved towards economic liberalism - freer markets. The rest of Europe is moving in this direction. China has moved towards free markets, as has India. We have multilateral free trade talks and agreements, the very existence of the WTO which has the power to rule subsidies illegal is a good example.
So i would agree if you said the world is becoming more liberal, but only if you use the original meaning of the word liberal, not the US meaning. The issues you see as being left/right issues like gun control, abortion, one world government, and China are not generally recognised as such outside the US.
If you are as well informed as you say you are, why would you go so far off the scale in describing liberals and their policies? Your use of “socialism” in the OP made you look like a fool. As you very well know, your opponents are liberals, progressives, and compassionate people. In most of the world, socialism is obsolete, a dead issue.
There is a fantastic online video/text educational series from PBS available on the web. It’s called The Commanding Heights, and it’s all about the ‘battle’ to see which philosophy would win - government control and socialism, or free markets and globalization. Free markets have been winning steadily since the 1970’s. Throughout the world countries have been shedding state-owned industries, dropping trade tariffs, liberalizing markets, and in general joining a global capitalist community.
Even in Europe countries have been moving back towards lower taxes and freer markets.
jjimm questions Roland’s peculiarly US-centric view of the political spectrum. I think the above quote from the OP illustrates this quite nicely.
Actually, Roland’s view of the political spectrum seems particularly Roland-centric. Nothing wrong with that on an individual basis, but not helpful in any kind of political analysis. Anything he views with suspicion is by definition Socialist, and therefore any evidence of it is a sign of Socialism on the increase from the US, socialist-free, norm.
And almost all of these trends were worse two decades ago. Canada’s health care system may be opening up to some market-based reforms. We went through a wave of deregulation and privatization in the 80’s and 90’s. We have lowered taxes, joined NAFTA, closed our government liquor stores and allowed the private sector to become involved, etc.
Australia has gone through a similar process. New Zealand took a big turn to the right when their welfare state went bankrupt. The U.S. has reformed welfare, lowered taxes dramatically over the last 20 years. Britain has privatized all kinds of state industry and lowered taxes. And of course, the Soviet Union collapsed and numerous states have made radical right-wing turns. Russia has a flat tax. The Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia have all instituted various free-market reforms.
I’d just like to point out that current Australian Federal government, in power since 1996, is very right-wing in terms of Australian politics. Thirty years ago, a left-wing Labor government was elected, which was relatively very left-wing (it brought in free university education for all, and so on). So Australians at least have definitely gone from very Blue to very Red.
Perhaps part of the difficulty is that you perceive such disparate and unrelated political entities as the Liberal Party in Australia, the Democratic Party in the United States, the Social Democrats in Denmark, the Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China all together as some sort of “the Left.”
How closely linked do you really believe all these things are?
For that matter, I’m not sure I would consider even the Democratic Party in the USA and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the USA to be close at all. YMMV, of course…
No we didn’t.
For almost 100 years here, there’s been gun control. (And the regular police don’t have guns either.)
The only exceptions were farmers, members of shooting clubs and shooting birds on private estates.
After a couple of handgun incidents, the UK recently banned members of shooting clubs from holding hand guns.
This means you live in the US, where this belief is practically built into the Constitution. It certainly doesn’t apply in Europe.
Sorry, but I fail to see anything in that thread where he refers to anything other than his current studies to become a nurse.
People can get multiple degrees, you know. Additionally, he did mention that his PolSci creds were a minor, not a major. I disagree with a lot of things about/with Roland, but I think you’re grasping at straws here.
Or, as I’d just like to point out, to use the color terminology that nearly everyone in the world other than Americans uses, and that includes Australians, they went from quite Red (socialist) to quite Blue(conservative).
It’s weird enough when yinz use it to talk about US matters, it’s freaky enough to cause me to write incredible run-on sentences when I hear it exported
