Those quizzes don’t mean much. It’s easy to talk the talk, but when the bill comes due in real life a lot of people run to the center.
Sometimes centrism = ignorance, but sometimes it’s simply complacency. That’s what I see a lot of on this board, and more so as time goes on and the board skews older.
Because the positions being “mainstream” or not are immaterial and it would be a silly hijack. I do not dispute that “most” American Liberals would prefer single payor; so would Clinton. Scrapping what we have now in order to refight for it is what he is demanding. That a) I do not believe that most want and b) is what, like the $15/hr minimum wage, is something Clinton has explicitly stated she would not do, even though saying she would would have been doing the more popular thing to do. In a circumstance under which a candidate refused to pander on an issue and won the most votes anyway, the losing candidate is a bit out of line to demand capitulation on that item or else they will withhold support.
I have not been angry until this last threat he explicitly made. No my anger is not at the ideas. It is explicitly and exclusively at threatening to withhold support from Clinton’s run and the party in November unless she accedes to his various demands, unless she agrees to accept all of his platform as her own despite his having lost.
“Progressive” is an insult only to apply to me, and exclusively because I associate it with people who think like you do. Lazy sloppy and counterproductive to actually doing of any good for society, people who place expressions of ideological purity (meaning the exact positions they want) over actual accomplishment, and who are happy to risk great harms in service of their posturing. Enjoy!
You’re wrong about 1), and 3) is an unoriginal, baseless, and overblown insult towards me because your anger is getting the better of you.
This is the kind of anger I was addressing earlier.
Your characterizations of positions are so bizarre I don’t know how to respond to them. That’s not how any of those issues are framed in the America I live in. Fracking is not even left-right as much as it is local opportunism vs. local damage. Free trade has been a Democratic national policy since Clinton. Minimum wage increases are widely approved of and opposition is less political than interest-based.
I could only wish that the physical portions of my body were as rigorous as my intellect.
I’m guessing you weren’t around or old enough to remember Hillary’s first foray into politics and how her original healthcare proposal – long before Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama were talking about this issue in the national spotlight – Hillary Clinton introduced healthcare reform. For her efforts she was slapped down by patriarchal members of congress on both sides who felt she was acting in a manner unbecoming of a First Lady. I mean, the nerve of her. Didn’t she know? She’s not supposed to propose laws – that’s men’s stuff. She was supposed to just do PSAs and wear dresses in front of the camera. She’s been dealing with the nastiness of the extreme right a lot longer than Barack Obama, who somehow seemed almost surprised at his treatment once he rolled into office in 2009. Hillary wasn’t surprised. She’d been there.
What Hillary learned from her experience, and what Barack Obama later learned himself, and what I hope a President Bernie would also eventually learn, is that there’s a time to play offense and there’s a time to play defense (yes, I’m repeating this from another thread). Clinton’s votes were defensive votes. They didn’t have possession of the ball anymore. It’s not that smart to stand on your end of the court when the other team has the ball at the other end and is about to score against you.
You may not like the fact that progressives need moderates or centrists to pass legislation, but your not liking that fact doesn’t change said fact. Bernie Sanders, if were to somehow get elected, would either change his spots or be the most unproductive one-term president in modern American history.
To get the kind of sea-change you want would probably take extraordinary circumstances and public support. FDR’s New Deal was able to pass because they were confronted with very real, very visible realities. Bread lines. One out of four breadwinners unemployed. Probably 50 percent or more households living in economic distress. With no end in sight. FDR had a real mandate. No president has had that in the past 80 years and Bernie Sanders doesn’t have it now. When things get to that point, yeah, Bernie or someone who adopts his ideas might have a shot. But not until then. In the meantime, Hillary might be the best combination of progressive visionary and realist we have going. Not to mention she would enter the White House as the most qualified president elect in years.
I’m 57 years old, and I’ve been active in Democratic politics since 1976. I campaigned for Bill Clinton in 3 states in '92 and '96. Please save the revisionist spiel for someone who doesn’t know better.
Plus, he was cautious on deficit spending, and a free trader.
You can’t get elected without over-promising. But Clinton, like FDR, and unlike Sanders, tries to be responsible.
See:
I’m as Keynesian as the next guy. But increasing deficits during economic expansions would leave no room to spend our way out of recessions.
Agree with Martin here. Again per the quizzes I am pretty hard left yet I argue for what I consider the center here all the time (against both sides) and it is not out of ignorance. Often those on “sides” are those who can’t be arsed to think things through and listen to arguments from different positions with an open mind so just take the positions that are labelled as the ones of their self-identified group.
One can believe in a minimum wage increase but believe the economists’ analyses that $15/hr is past the point that causes more overall harm than good. One of many possible centrist positions is to have a “living wage” pegged to local costs of living. Another was the more middle ground proposal of $12/hr that Obama tried to get through. And couldn’t.
Being against the Free Trade policies that have been a Democratic national policy since W.J. Clinton is a statement of faith among progressives right now.
We’ve seen in this thread an example of someone who declares anything other than Sanders proposed moratorium on all fracking is unacceptable, and that person is not alone.
Certainly I would be rejected by any “progressive” even if I did not find the label distasteful as a self-descriptor … and the Right? Clearly I do not belong there. So what am I? (Boy is that a set up … :))
Do not mistake not taking “a side” (as defined by the loudest among us) as being the same as not considering the issues and taking positions. We who sometimes occupy the space that gets attacked from each side at the same time are not ignorant, thank you very much. It is simpler to position yourself at a pole and not think critically.
Meanwhile this much is clear: the far right dominated GOP Congress is already nowhere near what I would consider the center, let alone the somewhat Left of center that I’d prefer and not one of the current GOP candidates is anywhere close to what I would consider the center either. They are hard right (Kasich, despite his playing a moderate well on TV); batshit right (Cruz); and orthogonal to the the plane in both the authoritarian and the imaginary axes (Trump). Clinton and Sanders OTOH overlap on goals to a very large degree.
Sanders threatening that if he loses the nomination that he would only endorse Clinton and work for a Democratic victory if she agrees to change her stated positions and take on the exact battles that he wants to prioritize is beyond petulance and it is far from principled. It is, IMHO, unprincipled and irresponsible.
I am more than fine with Sanders staying in the race to the very end. He should talk about the issues. Make his case for scrapping Obamacare and starting over again battling for Medicare for all and for a $15/hr minimum wage. If the ideas are so popular and wise then he will win! Assuming he does not then maybe he can move the Overton window for the next cycle. Fine to try. But he a) should not do it in a divisive way that serves as Trump’s initial troops, especially in PA and WI, and b) if he loses he should be be gracious in defeat and quickly unify towards fighting against the great threat to all of us, center and far left alike, that the GOP presidential nominee will represent. And he should not position himself such that he cannot effectively do so.
DSeid, your dislike for the term progressive is irrelevant to me or the issue I’m raising. So are the positions of other posters in this thread. I’m talking about tens of millions, wide swathes of the electorate.
As you yourself note, the Republican side of the equation has become so hostile to any moderates in the party as to effectively write them out of existence. They have become so hostile to tens of millions of people they label as Others that they are attempting to repeal a half-century of advances.
The Democratic side does not balance the Republican side, true. The fraction that do label themselves progressives are nowhere near as extreme as the most moderate of Republican positions. That does not make the rest of the party centrists. There is no center to modern American politics. There is no set of middle-of-the-road policies that can claim bipartisan support or opposition. (Whether any individual issue might claim that distinction is also irrelevant: I did not say none existed - Martin Hyde’s attempt to refute me by naming some would be similarly irrelevant even if they had relation to reality.)
Sanders is also mostly irrelevant. He never had a chance to win, and he won’t. His policies will never be implemented. That doesn’t make Clinton or the majority of the Democratic Party centrist. Merely being for a chance to win the Presidency or policies that have a chance to be enacted doesn’t make anyone a centrist. Not in today’s world. Not in a world where slightly under half the population considers Clinton to be Satan in a pantsuit. Not in a world where the current President has angered progressives for seven years and still is considered to the left of a caricatured hippie.
The center does not hold. It has vanished. This is a new world where the old labels no longer apply. That is interesting and meaningful for the future, whereas whatever Sanders says now will be forgotten by summer.
But let me guess – you did NOT campaign for Al Gore. Oh, okay then, you’re not naive, just impractical. You were probably one of the morons who thought that voting for Ralph Nader would teach the democrats a lesson. At least I know who to blame for 9/11, the Iraq war, the financial crisis, and every other horrible thing that happened under George W Bush in those 8 years.
Wrong again. I was living outside the US during Gore’s campaign, but I voted for him.
Well good. Then you surely know the consequences of not voting against whoever the republican party happens to nominate for the presidency. Surely you know the consequences of allowing a republican to nominate justices for the supreme court and having total control over the government.
Your vote is not just about YOU.
I asked you to spare me the spiel. I’m not interested.
No one is entitled to my vote, and it’s too soon to make a GE decision. I haven’t even voted in the primary yet.
Here’s a tip for you, though: Probably not a good idea to imply someone is a moron when you are trying to persuade them to do something. Especially when what you are selling is so uninspiring to begin with.
I’m not trying to persuade; I’m pointing out that the decision to throw out the baby with the bathwater is a moronic decision. I stand by that.
Good night, though.
Evidence, please? A great many of us love his ideas, and would like to see them become politically possible. (I’m also glad he’s running, because, without him, Clinton’s candidacy would be a non-issue. Now, we’ve got a headline-making machine.)
I most certainly am. I’m also sane enough to know that my views can’t win in November, so I’ll accept the (vastly!) lesser of available evils.
You’re projecting an awful lot, addressing straw-man positions, and excluding the middle in political distributions.
Right. I know some Bernie or Bust people who would say you are doing the Lord’s work with that approach.
Sorry Exapno, but your comment was addressed specifically to my preferred self-identification as a slightly left of center centrist , and your claim was that there are no centrists - that those who don’t take sides are ignorant.
Now you seem to be making some other point that honestly I fail to see has any relevance to the discussions that you had been commenting on. Or really to make any coherent sense of.
No there is no defined set of middle-of-the-road policies that can claim bipartisan support or opposition. What an odd strawman definition of centrism to set up. Yes the GOP has ceded the center.
I do not dispute your basic description. The GOP is positioned in several separate overlapping camps far right of what I at least would consider center. Those who label themselves as progressives are indeed IMHO as well not so extreme compared to what currently gets labelled as “moderate” in the GOP. Yes, and?
There is a distinct separation between the politics in predominantly White rural districts and in urban-suburban ones. There are many axes by which populations can be divided and on some there are definite groups that are not at the poles.
Honestly I have no clue as to what you would define as centrist other than that which does not exist.
Meanwhile I continue to maintain that Sanders threatening, if he was to happen to somehow not get the nomination, to withholding his support in a general election race unless the candidate who won changed her clearly stated positions to match his, is, in the context of what is at stake, contemptible and pathetic.
There’s the misunderstanding. I was responding to the Pew typology link in that post. As I said, tens of millions of people.
No, our dear Bernie would *never *go negative. :rolleyes:
He needs two thirds of the remaining delegates. Not happening. It’s time to form an honorable exit strategy, even if you don’t execute it for a few weeks.
“Sharpening attacks” isn’t going negative. You mad he’s actually trying to win?