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Meeting everyone’s basic needs isn’t even far left. This is how far the Overton window has shifted to the right. Meeting everyone’s basic needs is left-of-centre. Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone’s basic needs met.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So Democrats are now where Republicans were in the 1980s: friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum.
Centrism doesn’t mean that you can’t choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can’t do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.
What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It’s a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn’t matter who.
The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can’t decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn’t automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.
It’s funny because from my European perspective there’s no (visible) left in the USA. Democrats are centrist. Sanders could be social democrat. Otherwise I fully agree with you.
The US political spectrum has shifted so far. What is right in the US is far right in the EU, and what is left in the EU is far left in the US.
I think this has only happened because of manipulation of the masses.
Lately I’ve caught myself thinking differently. The left is progressive because they want to progress civil rights. The centerists are conservative because they just don’t want things to change. The right is regressive because they want to turn back the clock. Honestly I think we need to stop calling people on the right conservative and give them the new label regressives.
Conservatives want to go back to the days when mediocre white men were greatly rewarded just for being white.
As a mediocre white guy, I can confidently say that is today. Any white guy who is like “I never got any special treatment for being white” has gone though life and society with their eyes closed.
There’s still systematic racism with America. That being said, everyone’s quality of life other than the uber rich has gone down noticeably. That’s part of the reason populist lies from Trump work so well.
You have to see conservativism and “the conservatives” as separate things. One is a group that can hold many different views and another is a view point itself.
Ugh, market socialism exists.
Not all socialism has planned economies. That’s communism. A specific subset of socialism.
Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on market economies. badumtssh
Right, but I see market socialism as an ideological compromise rather than inherent socialism. Im from scandinavia, and my country is a capitalist country with a strong welfare state.
You have “welfare capitalism” as they define it so that they get to still try to keep people tethered to capitalism. Capitalism is not just having money, it’s a system that prioritizes said money. Capitalism seeks to reduce regulation and separate the worker and owner class and basically by definition you don’t get to have a say if you don’t have money. Scandinavian countries are not finding a balance but are resisting capitalism while keeping its name and to make people not be afraid of not having it(for some fuckin’ reason people really want it I don’t get it).
If you have strong regulations, a government focused on taking care of people instead of relying on businesses to do it, and the people have fair power then you don’t have capitalism, just a system where private ownership exists but is not jerked-off at every turn like in the states. It was literally made up so the merchant class could keep all their money as monarchies were falling. It’s a not something you want to even associate with. Even the states hasn’t gone full capitalism because they know(knew) that it’s not a truly viable system.
I also want system with some level of private ownership, but I also don’t think private, for-profit power generation should be a thing and if a company under “capitalism” is too big to fail then at least a large part of it should be sold to the government, and at least have it’s executive board purged, not handed a bunch of money as they hold their employees’ jobs hostage.
Capitalism goes through different waves and has grown to accept government involvement insofar as to reduce market failures of which monopolies and externalities are some important ones. Unions are justified in capitalism by solving the market failure of asymmetric information.
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it’s more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff it’s communism.
If americans could read, they would be very upset.
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You can advocate for wealth taxes, unions, and other welfare measures within a capitalist system. I’m from one of the most egalitarian countries in the world and we are capitalist too.
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Nope, but I’m from scandinavia, no oil money.
Edit: also, I dont like categorical descriptions, because reality is more complicated. But what is happening in the US is more specifically referred to as “rentier capitalism”. In Scandinavia, we have something like “welfare capitalism”.
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I’m not saying we don’t have things to work on, but it’s not black or white. Social injustice gets reduced over time in a democracy. Name a country that is not capitalist that has never done bad things.
I consider myself Centrist because I would rather eat 10 pounds of fried bugs than align myself with either absolute clown show of a party.
I’m a free agent, and the haters can’t stand that they can’t have me.
That doesn’t make you a centrist. Ya’ll seriously have lost your ability to see anything objectively it’s wild. The Democrats aren’t left wing except for a few people I could probably count on one hand but nearly the entire country, and its inability to pay attention even across its northern border, believes that the Democrats must be left wing since the Republicans are right wing.
You may very well not be a centrist, or maybe you are, but basing that on anything that suggests that the Democrats are left, and left to a point where they balance the extremism of the GOP, renders he whole thing worthless.
We’ve been screaming at the US for years to get a fuckin’ clue PLEASE just become moderately politically literate we are begging you.
I spent 4 years going into debt for a degree in political literacy. And then more for a related Master’s. I appreciate the frustration, but I can assure you I know exactly what I’m taking about.
Relative to the 1D spectrum of D to R in the US, I’m certainly in the middle ground, beyond the border of what falls enough into the D realm. From a global perspective, sure, the Dems are already a mess that overlaps the center some, but thats a fuzzy edge and not as fully held by the Dems as most moderately informed Europeans like to imply.
And yes, the lack of appropriate labels makes me more of a “Centrist” than anything else, but its barely an accurate term, as is using a 1D left/right binary to define anything can be. I’m against many types of government spending, which only a decade or two ago used to be such a quaint way to identify oneself politically, then everyone dropped the mask and it’s just a full-on Kleptocracy out there now. On a Nolan Chart, I’m squarely in the Centrist square. On a quadrant evaluation, I fall into the same zone as Thomas Jefferson and…Marianne Williamson, oddly enough.
Plus, Lemmy needs to hear opinions from outside the tankie echo chamber.
I’d love to hear about that “many types of government spending” because that’s kinda important here.
Any dipshit can barely pass classes and get a degree. I’ve worked with engineers who can’t even fucking count pillars in a picture and argue when you politely ask for a recount so you’re gunna need to do a lot more than leave incredibly important context up in the air while flapping around your basically worthless-until-proven-otherwise degree.
Trump went to a good school. He’s bad at everything he supposedly learned there. Many republicans have law degrees and some days you wonder if they’re even able to read a children’s book with any level of competency.
Yes, well I also hate typing out my political beliefs on mobile, but you raise a fair point. Even though in sure you’ll hate everything I say out of principle. Apologies in advance for typos.
In general, the GAO does a good job of enumerating wasteful spending. For example, there’s 133 individual programs over 15 Federal agencies intending to expand broadband coverage. FFS, consolidate that. So there’s statutory reforms and some streamlining to be done strategically across government. Not to balance spoons on a fork better than one can look at a spreadsheet, like some people.
My family has spent their carers in education, and for me there’s no love lost with the Dept of Education being eliminated. Even if you reduce it to a small grantmaking entity that funds state level systems, that’s a function that can be easily done from within DOI.
There’s a large number of farm and oil subsidies that are so old as to be the goal of the industry to exploit. But oh no, don’t touch farmers because you might undermine Monsanto’s bottom line. These poor people are human shields.
Earmarks, while a pittance on paper at only $15B in 2024, are a cultural artifact of the endemic problem in budget making. While not all spending is Earmarked, there’s plenty beyond that scope which is a personal or lobbyist-initiated favor. Innumerable examples exist for this, and neither side is willing to get rid of theirs in order to get rid of the other side’s favorites. Everyone is the problem here. Sure, at some level this is a balancimg act with the cost of politics and playing to constituents. But the fact that most Reps see it as their right is the problem.
Military spending is crazy bananas and no one will touch it. Regardless of what idiots Musk and Hegseth say. The whole infrastructure is based on the Cold War+Post9/11 add on.
My career is in international development, and as an industry, it very often achieved remarkably little other than things like gainfully employing 10% of the PhDs in a small country in Sub-Saharan Africa to do office work. Some programs were awesome and saved lives and made a difference. They were the rare exceptions to the rule. However, simply strangling USAID like has happened is the stupidest, most expensive way to accomplish chaos with nothing to show for it. Many programs that engaged in short-term behavior change frequently showed how ineffectual they were in their own final reports, yet the same companies still thought they did a great job because they had simply not failed to complete the contract.
And don’t get me started on how many contractors there are that charge 50% above market rate just because they can. Doesn’t matter the industry, it’s literal collusion across every contractor. I’ve written the budgets, and learned how to be only a “tiny” part of the problem. The reliance on contractors is a strategic disadvantage. Because money can solve that problem, it goes away temporarily over and over. That was a low-information environment in the past, ordering copier toner from a paper catalog. We need a new round of procurement reforms.
I can go on and on. In large part, there’s no one simple solution here. It’s a lot of statutory reforms, hard work, strategic planning, and doing less with less that had to be adopted over years, as was done in the 90s. But at a much higher rate, and with more urgency. The US is in a genuine debt crisis, and the people who ran on crashing the system won in part because the Dems ran on ignoring this among other problems.
To be honest, I agree with most of that. I’d love to hear more about the department of education but I also don’t wanna waste too much of your time and am aware that in the States it’s not entirely what it may seem to be. Personally I think it should be expanded to be more of what people believe it to be; leaving education so fully up to states doesn’t seem to do much besides make it easier for republicans to turn their base into even bigger drooling morons.
But anyway thanks for clarifying, and in such depth, too. I’m glad to hear that “streamlining” doesn’t seem to mean the classic right-wing nonsense around making government small enough that it can be easily controlled by awful people. I’m also not sure how centrist these points are, especially if you’re aiming to, for example, not rely on private contractors. Left-wing policies aren’t “spend blindly”, that’s just a right-wing attack angle so they can defund things, so if you have ways for the government to be able to do things well then I mean of course I’m all for it.
The simple version is that there is no Constitutional mandate for the Federal government to do anything related to education, which is why education is a function of the states. Yet it’s also 4% of the Federal budget, so depending on how much of a strict constitutionalist you are, the root question is more about what does it really need to be doing, and why. I would argue that this far after the end of Jim Crowe, and the proliferation of for-profit universities, ED isn’t maintaining standards, and is moving too slow to not simply feed Univ of Phoenix publicly-backed loan and GI Bill funds at a net loss to both taxpayers and students.
At the state level, from what I hear second hand, ED does little more than manage overly complicated and tonedeaf grant mechanisms that flow down to state Education Departments, and then becomes this sort of Leviathan of distant micromanagement. Often with feckless management, confusing and unclear terms, and making the District/State/ED relationship unnecessarily odd and overly burdensome.
Carter carved a new Department out of the Proto-HHS, and it’s been a target of elimination since it was created. Its necessary functions can either get folded into DOI, or maybe back into HHS, or maybe even just a smaller independent agency, though that alone raises the specter of duplicitive administrative costs.
Reducing an individual to a single point on these charts is kinda a fool’s errand.
Far better to give yourself a series of points on stances you agree with and carve out a spread of your beliefs with an averaged point that represents you.
To say you are a centrist because your beliefs are purely in line with what society considers anodyne and ‘normal’ is far removed from a person that agrees with extreme positions on all sides of the compass.
This only makes sense if you insist on reducing complex multidimensional concepts to a single scalar value. Even intuitively it doesn’t make sense. You place yourself in the centre between two philosophies you disagree with? What?
It actually makes more sense when you don’t reduce it. Look up a Nolan Chart, or quadrant-based political stance diagram. I fall squarely into the center of the Nolan Chart.
You think that reducing to two dimensions is significantly different than reducing to one. I disagree.
Lol, a lot of political scientists disagree with you, too. I bet they’re all stupid, right?
Why do you think voting for a party aligns yourself with that party?
If two people want to attempt to unalive your mother with a 50% probability that they will succeed, and you have the chance to stop only one of them, reducing the chance to 25%. Does it mean that you align with whoever you do not choose?
Voting WITH a party is not the same thing as voting for a candidate that has openly identified as a member one party or the other because that is a barrier to entry or funding avenue for them.
I know it’s hard to accept, but the entire history of both parties hasn’t been “socialist utopia vs. Nazis.” For a century the Democrats didn’t eject all the Southern racists that declared they were Dems simply to be a counterpoint to Lincoln-to-MLK-era Republicans.
Even a cursory understanding of history should make anyone distrust all political parties forever.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Why not vote for Bernie then? Better than nothing. At least it may give a lot of people or the democrats faith that he could potentially win in the future.
I’m not saying that you need to give them your time, I’m just saying that voting for them doesn’t mean that you stand for what they believe. You can vote them and at the same time advocate for a different voting system.
Closed primaries. I never got a chance to vote for Bernie.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Like Bernie has said, it is the only realistic vehicle to carry someone like him into the White House. The way the US political system is structured your movement needs to take over an existing party instead of trying to establish its own new party from the ground up if it wants any hope of success.
Yes, that’s what “barrier to entry” meant in my comment. Happepend to Bernie, happened to a family member of mine at the county level.
Parties prevent YOU from being ABLE to vote for qualified candidates. That’s all they are for, to give unqualified rich or charismatic people a chance to sell the party to you. Nothing else.
agnostic are agnostic because there is no foolproof evidence basis.
with politics you can clearly see how some stances have been done and their effects. and other instances you also have a basis even in the most unclear case
just had an issue with the negative connotation implied here talking about agnosistics :D
I think we can all agree that adding religious parallels to anything is a waste of everyones time.
this
Yeah since people cannot be expected to have full knowledge of the evidence, you have to recognize you can be agnostic about some issues. It’s virtuous to seek evidence and knowledge, and you should make choices based on the best information you have.
I’m not advocating for independents btw. I think you should clearly pick a party to vote for, but the two party system is a horrible system for people who are pluralistic in their views.
Lol that’s not the far left’s position get the fuck out of here. The first paragraph is describing center/center-left.
Party A… We want to kill 1.000.000 people
Party B … We want to kill 0 people.
Centrist… Lets just kill 500.000 people.
Sometimes there IS no centrist position
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The Democrats aren’t Party B here. At best, they’re the “centrists”.
who’s party b?
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You are literally too stupid to know what genocide is
The bar is set too high these days. I thought turning the entire region into dust and not leaving a stone atop another, while sniping random civilians would get you some recognition, but it seems this is nothing to you.
Gee, that’s funny because you talk like a terrorist-supporting piece of trash.
“Terrorist” is just a buzz word used to describe someone who commits the same crimes (or significantly less severe crimes) as your typical western state (or Israel), but isn’t on your side.
Is that what you call your wife right before you beat her? We all know how men in areas like Lebanon treat women after all, and you’ve already told me how much you love assaulting people… 🤔
Even with your retarded assumptions about an entire religious group who are at this point leaving practices of their assigned at birth religion (like your typical christian, jew, and whatever else did and are still doing to this day), Lebanon is the last Arabic country you can apply this to, on account of it’s population being composed of ~40% christians and the Muslim population being split in half between two sects and a million beliefs.
I understand your cunt is hurting after Trump won the election and gave you a little taste of your own foreign policy at home, but we must emphasize the importance of staying civil and not lashing out while the very existence of people you know and love is threatened (or some shit Dem voters would have expected of Palestinians).
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But Party B gets less than 1% of the vote.
Irrelevant. When its war crimes at stake you do the right thing anyway even when its hard or you know you will lose. We’re not exactly arguing over school vouchers here are we.
Americans with their white or black bullshit
Still waiting on that basic need.
Biden built entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid, while ironically being against universal healthcare. Almost like his donors didn’t want it or something.
Dictatorships are dictatorships, regardless of the political ideology. Both sides did horrible things, like purging intellectuals and anyone seen as a potential threat, mass murder of entire social groups, maintaining informant networks to instil fear etc.
Both sides are the same amirite?
Straw man
Do you not think the far right wants to exterminate groups because they are impure?
I think they want to expunge groups because a monoculture is easier to control. If everyone fits into a couple of narrow boxes that all speak the same language, fulfill the same roles, have the same hard limits on expression and are all able-bodied, mentally tuned to function as desirable cogs in a machine you get an easily exploitable force. It’s why they want all costs of maintenance and risk borne by the individual and more specifically the family unit which has the power to ostricize and disenfranchise on a micro scale. Pluralistic societies mean that the individual is supported by a culture of acceptance and those groups all run off of different rules which make demands of society. They want a society that makes very few demands but feels catered to thus earning higher levels of compliance.
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They do. The problem is that the far left wants the same.
The meme is comparing the far right with the moderate left.
Genuinely asking. What groups do the far left want exterminated?
Take your pick. Who they most want to exterminate is other far left who have slightly different opinions, because these are “class traitors” and “counterrevolutionaries”.
Depends on the group and the country they’re from but it goes from anyone with more money than the person speaking, to any foreigners, to anyone with a brain that dares to think differently (“counter-revolutionaries”).
See Cuba, north Korea, Soviet Union (and puppet states) and the lemmy instances most people defedarate from, like lemmygrad.
Maybe it’s just my definition of left then, but that doesn’t seem compatible with leftist views, at least in my opinion
Well, we are talking about far right and far left, not moderates.
Well most people on the right would say that the extermination of a group is also incomparable with their views.
far right. And I was specifically referring to authoritarianism with my above comment.
If it’s meant to be US politics, they’re comparing the far right to the near right. Our left is carefully contained so it can’t affect anything.
Genuinely asking, not trying to be a dick, do you think the far left actually want that too? What makes you say that?
Never talked to anyone on .ml or grad about those who fail their purity tests, eh?
They literally want to kill my grandma because she rented out their beach house when they moved back into town instead of giving it to a family in need. Sure they’ll say “landlords means blackrock” but in reality, my grandma was a landlord (and a damn good one, her renters loved her, fair price, fast with hiring fixers for broken shit, etc) and they’ll admit “yes her too” when pressed.
Well that’s fucking horrible. I don’t like landlords as a concept, and sure kill Blackrock, but someone who has 1 or 2 extra properties, who isn’t a slum lord is fine. Beyond that I disagree generally but I wouldn’t call for your grandma to be killed for it
Sure you seem cool, but there are many self avowed leftists that are very uncool lol. I think most leftists are more like you, though it does seem the authoritarians are gaining traction (but I’m not sure if that is just my exposure to them from lemmy, so I’m still unsure if they actually are.)
Perhaps the bigger issue imo is that those people are still accepted by society at large instead of shunned like actual nazis (which they parallel quite a bit,) they should be equally shunned, but they’re good at keeping the murder part secret until you ask “and what if my grandma refuses to give you her house when you come with your ‘revolution?’”
You bring up some valid points
I thought the joke was that the alt-right says these perfectly normal things are far left?
Might be, in the US anyone asking for something as mild as universal Healthcare is quickly labeled extremist…
Well the far left (tankies) are actively supporting genocidal authoritarian regimes. Comparing extreme right wingers to non extreme left wingers is just complete shit.
Are tankies actually far left? I may be wrong but I don’t think you can be far left and authoritarian. Those two don’t seem to align, to me that is.
I think the political scale is the problem. Left and right doesn’t give enough nuance. We should be focusing on individual problems in their own rights and circumstances instead of using umbrella terms to write off the problems as sypmtoms of said term.
Yeah that’s fair
Every communist regime so far has been authoritarian.
Yes that is true, I feel like the semantics of “no true communist” are valid, authoritarianism doesn’t fit left wing in my view
No true Scotsman is a logical fallacy. It’s literally nonsense.
Yes I know, that’s why I said it feels like but I didn’t intend to make it as an argument, that’s why I highlighted the fallacy
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every meme is in essence a straw man XD
you really thought you were smart here
Dumb. The centrists are not the same as the non-voting. But I guess this is a far-left circle-jerk, and it’s none of my business.
![Kermit drinking tea] (https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/4886e3a9-8b73-4788-b5ab-ed822c80bee1.webp)
Let’s not suck off the left too hard, they have some splaining to do for this mess as well.
Let’s not suck off the left too hard, they have some splaining to do for this mess as well.
For not supporting Jill Stein? Agreed.
The left has “splained” that genocide is not negotiable enough times already, and now you’re just being tedious.
And best of luck trying to get republicans on “your side”.
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Why would they do better when you vote for them no matter what they do?
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I think people who call Republicans and Democrats the same are just in love with their own need to rant. When they’re elderly they’ll walk around shouting at trees.
The far left and far right are both bad. If in doubt, look at any country which has gone down either path.
Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?
I’ll just take a pass on the far-anythings.
(Anyone who tries to paint this as pro Trump needs to reread it)
