I can definitely see justification for that list. LBJ would certainly be “most liberal” by my metric, too. I’d put Carter left of Obama. Clinton would actually be my pick for “least liberal” of the Democrats, which is why I say “about right” in my post above. After thinking about it more, I may have to agree with your ranking of JFK. I would switch Obama and Carter, though.
Absolutely–unless we are grading on some impossible-to-adjudicate basis of “for their respective times”. What did FDR do to regulate the environment? To guarantee equal rights for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people? What about for blacks and Latinos? (Mississippi’s all-white vote went 98% for FDR in 1936.) What were his programmes for heatlh care, housing, and food for the poor? (After all, WPA and CCC were “workfare” at best.) What percentage of the GDP was spent on social programmes? What kind of regulation of the workplace was there for safety in those pre-OSHA days? (Heck, based on legislation signed, you could argue Nixon was more liberal than FDR.) What did he do to provide for rights of the accused and for decent treatment of prisoners?
To me, public policy as concerns race prejudice is one of the most important ways in which I judge presidents. So before LBJ, there’s really only one president who impresses me, and that’s Ulysses Grant. (Truman gets an honourable mention for desegregating the armed forces, and JFK gets an “incomplete” but I have my doubts about whether he would have gone as far as LBJ did.) And the fact that Grant was president more than a half century earlier than FDR says that the “for their time” standard is not a fair yardstick after all.
You mean where ultra-right wing parties are ascendant? In any event, we can’t just say “look at the left wing tilt to other countries’ politics (mostly in Europe): no reason we shouldn’t do that here.” This ignores the profoundly libertarian and Puritan ethos the United States was founded on, and which attracted similarly thinking immigrants from Europe (who, by leaving, left their countries of origin more secular and communitarian/progressive). We can’t just do like Europe because we don’t have their electorate. IMO Obama has gotten us as close to that as is humanly possible (which is why he has aroused such great ire among the Tea Party crowd).
That’s absolutely untrue. While they were in those seats, they voted for Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership, whcih makes a big difference; and they agreed to an admittedly watered-down compromise version of HCR which is still a half a loaf and still better than none. The Republicans who replaced them would not have voted for any kind of HCR, so how can you say it makes no difference? Those were as far left as those districts were ever going to go: our best case scenario.
Look, I am in my forties and have not had health insurance since I was in my twenties (though I do have several thousand dollars in unpaid hospital bills that I periodically get hounded about). This is real for me. And it matters to me whether Obamacare is allowed to come online in 2014. No public option, but it will still be a great boon to me and allow me to start going to the doctor at a phase in my life when I really need to be able to! So it kind of pisses me off to read all these complaints from “progressives” who make the perfect the enemy of the good, even as they probably will have health insurance regardless of who wins the election.
No; “fascism” is being used to mean “people who want to give absolute power to the state and worship the wealthy & military”. And the Right wants to go quite a ways farther back than the 1950s. And the (not very large) decline in religiosity is part of the motive; they want to stop it by writing their religion into law, and killing anyone who objects.
I don’t think so. The “Obama” and agenda they hate is one that exists only inside their own propaganda, and has little connection to the actual Obama or anything he does. What Obama does or doesn’t do has nothing to do with why they hate him; they hate a fictional character they’ve created and his equally fictional deeds, not the actual Obama.
(Missed edit)
About the only real thing they hate him for is being a black Democrat.
We wouldn’t know. People are dumb or in denial. They could print their eye-in-the-pyramid emblem on the dollar bill and we wouldn’t know. Wait . . .
That’s probably true on foreign policy, but Carter deregulated a lot of domestic industries and didn’t accomplish any major liberal legislative feat as President.
Considering that real fascism in Italy and Germany had ambiguous attitudes toward the wealthy not a Randian view of exalting them, that’s not an accurate description.
In what ways?
Besides the ridiculousness of the last part, the decline in religiosity also show that the Religious Right is past its peak of power. Considering how little influence they had at the federal level even during the Bush years, it is unlikely they’ll able to repeat the feat much less establish their dominance.
And Carter vetoed 31 bills in his four years in office. (For comparison’s sake, Reagan vetoed 15 over the following eight years.) I bring this up because, thanks to Watergate, Carter had huge Democratic majorities in Congress, and it was a pretty liberal Congress at that. So he was vetoing his own party’s agenda. One of his last vetoes, of a bill to provide health care for veterans, was overridden 401-5 in the House, and 85-0 in the Senate. Think about that. Something kind of messed up was clearly going on with the guy.
Agreed. The fears I see among some progressives (including some of those upthread) of the Christian fundie bogeyman are really hard to square with reality. As much as the Religious Right might wish otherwise, there’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. Look at the polling on marriage equality, for instance: among those under forty, it’s a blowout. That means in a few decades, if not sooner, it will be a blowout among the entire electorate, full stop. I mean, unless somehow the next generation inexplicably decides to ignore the generation preceding them and act just like their octogenerian great-grandparents or something, but I just don’t see how that would come about.
There was/is a PBS documentary on Carter where this was touched upon. As I recall, Carter had some bad experiences with, and opinions of, the corrupt Georgia legislature. From that, he formed a highly negative view of legislators seeking to spend money on pretty much anything. He’d never attribute to actual public need – or honest perception of public need – what he could attribute to corruption. 
The way I recall it being expressed in the documentary was that the more Congressmen came to him to impress upon him that he couldn’t cut X, the stronger his resolve became to cut X. :smack:
I remember that too, John. It supplies context, but still makes him ultimately come across as pretty conservative for a Democrat.
That’s funny; I just filled it out giving answers I thought Obama might give, based on my knowledge of his policies and public statements, and got +5.12, +3.64. Now, I obviously cannot read Barack Obama’s mind and gauge his feelings on astrology or abstract art, but I can wager a guess on his feelings about religion (he’s for it), economics (he’s for free markets and globalization), and civil rights (he’s for 'em, but…). I have only his actions to base my selections on. He might believe personally that marijuana should be legalized, but his policies don’t seem to reflect that; he probably thinks that globalization should serve humanity and not corporations, but again his policies do not reflect this (IMO). He might think that religion is a crock and that its adherents are laughable, but he ain’t saying that out loud.
I also got a +6.62, +5.64 for Romney. I think mostly because I checked a lot more of the “strongly’s.”
The thing about this test is that its very personal. It reflects an personal emotional or rational approach to issues, but not an impersonal pragmatic one. I’m way down in the left corner on that chart, but if tomorrow I decided to run for mayor, or governor, or president, I would have to accept my inability to wave my magic wand and say “legalize everything!” I’d probably have to adopt significantly more realistic positions, same as I must when I vote for mainstream politicians. Somebody charting me would see a pronounced shift toward the center. Obama could well be a radical leftist at heart, although I doubt it. But it’s not possible to measure from far away. So it is with all politicians.
If you believe in astrology, then you believe that there’s some kind of higher power that “shapes our ends.” Therefore, you believe in deference to outside authority. Same with religion. Same with the racism questions: if you believe that one race is superior to others, that one culture is superior to others, then you believe in a hierarchy of authority, or at least that there should be. I suspect that even the question about some people being “naturally unlucky” is meant to play into this idea, but I’m not sure. Anyway, a yes to this would be a plus in the authoritarian column.
So you are arguing that Romney’s 47% remark was right on the money and that Obama really should have beat him to the punch in saying it if he had a lick of sense? :dubious:
I have a feeling this question tracks authoritarianism.
Ah, sorry for the double post but the edit window expired: took the test and strongly disagreed with everything including the race question and got 0 economic, -4.36 authoritarian. Retook it and got -3.9 authoritarian and 0 economic strongly agreeing with the race question but strongly disagreeing with everything else. Even if one disagrees with the content validity of race being a question of authoritarianism, there is probably a good concurrent validity (how likely a person is to do on another test of authoritarianism) and predictive validity (how likely a person is to vote for an authoritarian candidate, say).
The funny thing is, he’s not even greatly liberal. He supports allowing state employees to direct their students to prayer, he supports banning abortion for the country and he supports a constitutional amendment in order to prevent gays from marrying. The only issue where he’s less authoritarian than either of the main candidates is in legalising marijuana and that he uses as a smokescreen for how inimical his policies would be to minorities.
Dunno about that, but Obama might usefully have said something about the 1%.