You can see Hillary’s entire platform on her website. Can anyone find one issue where she isn’t a centrist?
This isn’t a bad thing. I’m voting for her because she’s a moderate, and I suspect her entire platform is crafted as moderate in order to win the Presidency.
That waters the term down so far that it becomes meaningless. Every government (and most anarchies) in all of human history would be “authoritarian” by that definition.
It makes more sense to use the word judiciously, pointing to regimes that are intrusive and invasive in their use of authority, like North Korea, but excluding the term from being used against such moderate governments as Canada, New Zealand, or Japan.
If you hold that Canada is an “authoritarian” nation, you’re using the word senselessly.
Well, I think there’s been some actual drift in the meaning of “liberal” in American politics, too. Democrats used to be the liberal party. Nowadays by international first world standards, they’re moderate at best. American politics have been moving ever further right; so now we need a term to distinguish between the liberals-who-are-really-moderate-to-conservative, and liberals-who-are-actually-still-liberal. And yes, still interested in progress.
When the status quo sucks, there is little merit in maintaining it.
Using the term as I’ve described is useful as a measure of degree. It’s not like authoritarian is a binary construct. Using the political compass for reference, the Y axis represents a scale that goes from libertarian to authoritarian. And apropos to this thread, Clinton comes in higher than Sanderswith respect to authoritarian-ness. I do note that all the Republican candidates come in higher still.
There have been a number of posts along these lines here and I have to agree with them, albeit reluctantly. I will vote for HRC, but I won’t expect much. I will even vote for her over Bernie in the primary, although I agree with nearly all that he says. But I wouldn’t give a fig for his chances of winning and, if he did, of accomplishing much.
Sure he says that a win by him would be accompanied by a revolution in American political sensibility that would give a majority in both houses. Sure it would and pigs would learn to fly.
Here is my take on the difference between liberals and conservatives. Neither is in favor of small government and both would like somewhat less regulation and also somewhat more. They differ mainly in who they want to regulate. Liberals want to deregulate individuals while increasing regulations on coporations. Conservatives want exactly the opposite. And I guess progressive is just a less weighted synonym for liberal.
Agreed; that works. A police department is “more authoritarian” than a fire department, even though neither is “authoritarian” in its fundamental definition. (A really corrupt police department might become so – New York City in the 1880s, Chicago in 1968 – but the stereotypical English county constable in an Agatha Christie novel is not.)
Not too serious with this pedantry but then what happens when a progressive wins a majority of the votes? When the positions espoused by a progressive become those endorsed by the mainstream, when the center adopts those positions, are they then, by definition, no longer progressive positions?
Nah, we get to keep labels, even when they’re obsolete. March of Dimes, etc.
Mexico has the PRI – the Institutional Revolution Party. How’s that for a contradiction? When they’re the party in power – as they were for decades – how can they possibly be “Revolutionary?”
I know a guy who, when asked his political alignment, answers, “Whig.”
Well yes. A progressive in 1990 may be a centrist today if their positions did not change at all. Progressivism (and centrism and conservatism) shifts with the ages (oh, and not always in one direction)