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Centrism is the natural and intended outcome of representative democracy. The "center", at least in theory is a compromise position between various political factions with broad appeal and no dealbreakers, intended to be acceptable to a significant majority of the electorate. In practice, it doesn't really work out that way, but that's due to largely to significant social breakdowns and flaws in our systems of government. Remember this - the center is not, strictly speaking, an ideology of its own. Rather, it's the expected result of the compromises inherent in democracy. That's the case even in parliamentary democracies, and the US's ancient system has always been particularly problematic in that regard.Higsian posted:Look at how the centre abandons and shits on the rural poor whites. It's because they view those poor whites as not being worthy of power any more, of having their voices heard. They happily hit down just as much as the rest for the right, they just have different views of what is down. Notice how centrists deride the rust belt for wanting jobs instead of welfare? You know why the people want the jobs? It's not because they're stupidly clinging to a past that will never be again and are just too drat proud to take welfare. It's because employment is empowering. Doing a job gives you power over your employer; direct, individual power over the people who decide the money you're given. Granted the employer holds the balance of power, but some power is better than no power, and people have effectively no power over their welfare payments. You're way off here. In the US, it's the left that derides the poor rural whites for wanting jobs over welfare. I don't know how it is in countries that speak the Queen's English, but here in the US the idea that employment is inherently empowering is a right-wing idea shared by the center and largely rejected by the left.
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Dec 12, 2016 17:11
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icantfindaname posted:I agree, unfortunately though a huge chunk of left-liberals still actively consider themselves centrists/Third Way That's not because they think centrism is a compelling ideology that they're deeply devoted to. It's because they think centrism is closer to what voters want, and is most likely to be the end result of any Congressional effort anyway. And there probably was some truth to that two decades ago. But partisanship has been skyrocketing over the last decade or two, and moderates on both sides are being blamed for every real or perceived problem with the country; it's fair to say that today's Third Wayers are people who weren't able to adjust to swings in voter opinion and public discourse.
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Dec 12, 2016 18:32
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Gio posted:Ok, I'm talking about "work" as in "fulfilling a useful role in society," not specifically wage labor, in reference to basic income as a solution to decreased labor force participation and rising inequality caused by automation. The basic assumption inherent in your position is that working at Wal-Mart qualifies as "fulfilling a useful role in society", because you're assuming that any work that people get paid for is necessarily useful to society (and vice versa). What about volunteering at a homeless shelter? It's not a job, and people don't get paid for it - does that mean it's less useful to society than stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart?
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Dec 12, 2016 21:27
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Higsian posted:I've been following American politics very closely since the mid 90s to the point that I'd say I was more familiar with American politics than Australian politics until a couple years ago actually. I don't really care about national borders and America has a huge influence on the rest of the world (and our Liberals are unfortunately prone to follow in your footsteps) so American politics are very relevant to me. So I'm not completely ignorant of how things are over there. And yet you thought that being pro-welfare was a centrist position in the US, so I suspect that you don't know US politics nearly as well as you think you do. Again, centrism is not an ideology or a movement, it's the intended result of the compromises that are supposed to be inherent in all modern systems of representative democracy. Your arguments lose a lot of power because you insist on arguing against a strawman you built yourself for the specific purpose of this argument, one designed in the form of an imaginary enemy that doesn't exist. Higsian posted:Also note that both the Labour right in the UK and Labour in Australia have attacked their left counterparts (Labour left in UK, The Greens in Australia) with claims of anti-semitism much like some centrist Democrats are doing with Keith Ellison. The Labour right in the UK in particular is so loving blatant in what they're doing and where their allegiances truly lie it's kinda breathtaking. Take a look into that if you haven't. Wait, what do you mean by this? Where do you think their allegiances truly lie? Please, enlighten us  And since you've already demonstrated your ignorance of American politics, let me clear something up for you: the anti-Semitism accusation hurled at Ellison has nothing at all to do with "centrist Democrats", "establishment Democrats", or any other kind of Democrat. That's just something cooked up by people whose worldview is incompatible with the idea that establishment Dems might support a leftist, and therefore they rationalize it by ascribing any criticism of Ellison at all to the establishment Dems.
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Dec 13, 2016 17:41
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Fiction posted:So Haim Saban isn't part of the establishment, then? He's a pro-Israel lobbyist, opposing Ellison because of very specific criticisms Ellison made about pro-Israel lobbyists. Nothing to do with the "establishment".
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Dec 13, 2016 20:11
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Higsian posted:You'll also note that I only link welfare and the US when I'm talking about the rust belt. A big argument from centrists on this forum was that the rust belt is never going to recover, that the jobs are never coming back, and the rust belt needs to get over the idea of jobs and accept that welfare is their future. You can't bring the jobs back because free trade and even if we changed change policy it wouldn't work because automation so lets just throw welfare at them and go back to pretending they don't exist instead of learning from Trump's win there. I figured addressing points people had made on this forum might be useful in bringing it home for people. The problem is that, once again, your lack of understanding of US politics undermines your point. The argument you describe here is the leftist argument. The centrist solution to the Rust Belt usually amounts to mumbling some vague crap about green jobs and infrastructure spending - it's only the left that are willing to admit that capitalism has fundamentally and permanently failed these areas and that capitalist solutions won't fix them. Higsian posted:Lemme try explain it under those terms. Ideally, what should set the position of the center is not the relative power of legislative factions but rather the relative influence of those positions among voters. The fact that things often don't work this way is due to the fact that we have yet to come up with the perfect representative democracies, and fixing an imperfect representative democracy is really hard even when we know what the problems are. The reason establishment Democrats were caught flat-footed was because Obama's charisma masked serious flaws developing in the Democratic campaign machine, and they failed to properly account for the incredible increase in partisanship and polarization over the last decade and a half.
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Dec 14, 2016 16:32
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:were democracy actually predicated on everyone in the country without exception clapping their hands and believing in the transformative power of the truth being somewhere in the middle rather than unabashedly pushing to advance their causes by any legal means it'd boggle the imagination any democratic state coulda lasted this long, really. That's kind of an asinine way to run things, and certainly wasn't how people felt back when Congressmen were dueling each other and dishing out beatings on the house floor over causes they actually believed in and disagreed on. This isn't just a US problem. Many other Western democracies have similar problems with their governmental structure. For example, Israel's parliamentary democracy trends more right-wing than it really ought to, because no one's willing to let the Arab parties into the governing coalition, forcing the government to be excessively reliant on the far-right parties.
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Dec 14, 2016 22:17
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