To the extent that the left/right dichotomy is useful at all, you have to recognize that it’s completely relative. Take the bell curve of political positions in the US at any given time, and that defines the left and the right. The fact that other countries have different bell curves is completely irrelevant. We might as well bemoan the fact that there is no “real right wing” movement of significance in Sweden, based on right wing thought in the US.
That argument doesn’t work. The fact that America is much more to the right than certain other countries means that it is much closer towards becoming an outright fascist, plutocratic or theocratic state than they are. Your argument presumes both that it doesn’t matter where in the political spectrum we fall, and that the spectrum is infinite; neither is true.
Although I wouldn’t use those words, I agree with what you’re saying. If the US is farther to the right, it doesn’t matter that it’s not right-wing relative to itself. Iran isn’t a totalitarian theocracy relative to Iran. So what?
Also, you have to look at the variance as well as the mean. The fact that US spectrum is much narrower than in most European countries is also a problem. On top of the fact that it means no meaningful debate on anything substantive except a couple of hot-button issues that the parties have chosen to differentiate themselves on, the paucity of difference between the elephant and the donkey may be part of the reason the ratings opportunity for the fox exists (to use Rhythmdvl’s great metaphor).
Two questions. please.
(1) Are you claiming that “Democrat policies” are farther “left” than they were a few decades ago? Obviously “Democrat” covers a wide-range but since “Democrats” more-or-less controlled the government in 2009, one might define their policies by what they did then.
(And, BTW, the correct answer is: No: Democrat policies have clearly moved to the “right.”)
(2) While you state authoritatively that the Democrats have been “pushed … left”, your similar statement about the GOP was “for the sake of argument.” Are you biased?
Recently the Demos passed a health bill with almost zero Repub support. The health bill was to the “right” of earlier Repub-proposals that were rejected decades ago by Demos as not liberal enough!! 
May I ask how old you are, Dcypher ? I suspect you’re young; as otherwise your political amnesia would seem startling.
Somewhere in this thread I saw a claim that Demo policies are “left of center”. I’d be curious to hear from (non-Anglo) European Dopers; I’d guess Demo policies are closer to what would be considered “right of center” in many countries.
We keep seeing this claim here. Judging by posts like yours, I wonder if instead right-wing thinking is more prevalant here than it would be in a typical intellectual forum.
Several decades ago, both major parties had a bell-curve distribution of ideologies. The Demo mean was to the left of the GOP mean, but there was much overlap; both parties pursued more-or-less centrist policies, and American politics functioned well. If you’re advocating a return to that environment, count me in!
Instead, money politics, and a media modality that brings out the stupidest thinking has driven all politics (Demo and Repub) farther and farther right. Many voters instinctively prefer “moderation” but in the American context they naively assume that centrism is somewhere between the Demos (actually center-right) and the Repubs (far-right). Thus the term “centrist” as applied in today’s America causes a right-ward drift.
But we’re not talking about the US relative to other countries in this thread. We’re talking about whether we need both parties. We’re talking only about the US.
Why is that?
But that’s probably more a result of our particular system of government and our culture rather than on the relative closeness of the parties.
Also, the idea that there’s no meaningful right wing in Europe is fallacious. It wasn’t that long ago that Maggie Thatcher was P.M.
Just because Europeans have better health systems than we do doesn’t mean that they always lean to the left (with respect to the U.S.) on ALL issues.
Agreed. Thatcher’s Britain was to the left of Carter’s (and Clinton’s) America.
I agree that political competition is a good thing. It’s much less clear that we need 2 parties rather than, say, five or six. I’m not convinced that we need these 2 particular parties. The Democrats are fine: transplant them to Europe or Japan and they would be part of the center-right. The Republicans have lacked seriousness for years. A party that embraces economic and scientific crankery outside of election season needs replacement.
I don’t know about that. Socially, perhaps, but not economically.
Thatcher cut welfare. But the welfare state under Thatcher was nonetheless far more generous than that of the US. It wasn’t unusual for young unmarried middle class males to be on the dole in Britain, for example. So Thatcher’s policies were to the left of America’s.
The party system is a product of our governmental structure and winner-take-all electoral system. As for the Republicans and scientific quackery… that’s just a refection of the beliefs of the electorate. I don’t see how that is going to change unless the electorate changes.
Economic quackery, OTOH, is no monopoly of the right.
Because it makes it extremely difficult to solve problems when the solution lies outside of that narrow political range. I consider this narrowness the most likely aspect of America to lead to a general collapse, since it inevitably leads to more and more problems getting worse and worse since the solutions are taboo.
Every system of government will collapse sooner or later. The US’s system has already lasted longer than other systems which don’t have those “flaws”. We must be doing something right.
Diversity of opinion isn’t always a plus. The different Iraq factions have very different ideas about what the government should be doing. I wouldn’t want to emulate that.
No, because this extreme narrowness is historically recent; we’ve become narrower and narrower and narrower.
So might have said a French royalist in the 1770’s.
True.
Disagree. Lefty quacks remain in their fringe. Right wing quacks do too, unless they receive outside funding from insecure billionaires (supply side economics, devoid of empirical content) or oil interests (global climactic change). On the left, Democratic Presidents invariably come out in favor of free trade: the record of Republican Presidents is comparably mixed. Think GWBush and the steel industry.
Counter-examples from the 1970s are acknowledged. The Republican Party used to be dominated by the sensible.
But you’re ignoring the point that the spectrum isn’t relative. Measuring the US relative to the US is meaningless.
If the goal is to get “moderate” policies (which I don’t agree with, but I’ll accept for the sake of this argument), and both parties are to the right of what’s actually moderate, then having both parties doesn’t do any good at all. The same would be true if both parties were to the left, of course.
Unless you want to argue that whatever position happens to be halfway between the Dems and Reps is always magically the right answer, even as that position shifts over time?
The answer is in the very next sentence, which you already quoted and replied to, so I’m having a hard time understanding how you missed it.
There is much less meaningful debate today than there was in the past, even though our particular system of government hasn’t changed. It’s not provably certain that the coming together of the two parties on most positions is the cause of this, but it seems pretty plausible to me.
Actually, I think it’s a result of both factors. As you imply, it’s an inherent fault of our system that it channels all debate into an argument between two parties. But that wasn’t nearly as much of a problem until those two parties ended up on the same side on so many issues.
Well, not like this they haven’t.
So if the conservative party is ultra right wing and the progressive party is only sorta right wing, and this is a democracy, what does this say about this country? Or is it possible that you are viewing this from a somewhat left of center perspective?
I find it odd that one bad liberal administration can turn a nation away from liberalism despite several horrible conservative administrations.
I don’t think either of us can prove either way. You can probably cite all sorts of other factors that were important but the people I talk to who somewhat conservative but not really partisan think that the surge was pretty important to our brief period of success there.
No, its them having no sack. They wanted a larger stimulus but they were afraid of criticism. They wanted universal health care but they were afraid of criticism. They are basically political cowards. I don’t believe Republicans have been fiscally responsible since Reagan (and I can’t say for sure they ere ever fiscally responsible before that (I thought Eisenhower raised taxes to pay off the war debt).
So you’re agreeing with me.
The only thing jammed down America’s throat was the Fox News/Right Wing Talking Point that a major campaign issue and extraordinarily compromised bill was somehow jammed down America’s throat. It boggles the mind that people fell–and continue to fall–for the advertising slogan.
Well, the democracies of most upper income countries are less saturated with special interest money than the US. The Supremes declared limits on campaign spending to be illegal in the US during the 1970s. More recently, anonymous corporate donations have been running full blast, after 5 of 9 justices decided Citizens United. More prosaically, basically every representative is beholden to corporate PACs, so the Democrats are a party of business, while the Republicans represent the Chamber of Commerce.
Again, in any other mature democracy, the Democrats would be a center-right party.
Well, they only had 59 votes in the Senate when the stimulus passed - and the Republicans decided that 60 votes were needed to pass anything. What’s remarkable is that the Republicans were able to change the rules of the game without debate – the press bought into this state of affairs almost instantly.