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Main Paineframe posted: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. It's not a "leftist" argument, it's the argument of a bunch of workshy democratic bougies posing on the internet as radicals because they think that Marx was all about being less down on the French welfare state than Rush Limbaugh and the idea of personal autonomy and material comfort not being things that just happen to you is an entirely abstract, theoretical one that mostly appears in exciting novels. It's 'let them eat cake'. The leftist position orients around democratizing control of the means of material production - whether they're overseas or automated or spontaneously generated by fairy magic - rather than figuring that 'the labor model now is different from in 1867' is a case for handing all power and economic relevance to the capitalist rentiers. Whether you plan to then tax them a small percentage on their ownership of everything to keep everyone else minimally not-starving or not. The window of leftist discourse is on how to grant the people ownership of that which keeps them clothed and fed and empower them to advocate for their own interests from a position of strength, not what rate of patronage we should petition Warren Buffet for as his wholly dependent vassals. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 20:49
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asdf32 posted:Consistently "arriving" in the center requires a desire to do so. It's not automatically emergent from the rules of the system and requires a culture (and a voting public) that allows or encourages it. 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. it's almost like the democratic system has decayed in the US and what underpins the government now is some handshake agreements and social conventions shared by an insular, legally unfettered ruling class assumed to all pretty much already agree on everything they really value A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 21:31
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TomViolence posted:Just look at how energised and enthusiastic the republican base has been for the past 8 years compared to the dems, it's because the republicans pulled away from the safe center and pursued a radical agenda, tugging the overton window right as they did so. the republican base disengaged and started primarying out their leadership because the policies of the Bush Administration hurt just about everyone in the country in a pretty visible and dramatic way, not because they got bored. following the collapse of neoconservatism they have had no coherent policy vision beyond foiling the expansion of big-government liberalism and continuing to throw the bastards out, that motivates people better than McCain/Romney style 'more of the Bush administration hooray' at this point but it's not a 'radical agenda' in the sense that say fascism or dominionism or Cheneyesque schemes to conquer the entire Middle East are. Mentally normal people only care about 'radical agendas' inasmuch as the idea of not using the federal government to hurt people is now considered a radical idea outside the Overton window. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 06:58
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Kilroy posted:This is basically what's going to happen, and I am not keen to find out what a Reign of Terror in 21st century America looks like. Nobody's situation is going to improve under the GOP and Trump, and the Democrats aren't prepared to offer an actual alternative. Even if they win in 2018 and 2020, it's going to be off the back of doing a better job of selling Centrism (see: everything Nancy Pelosi has said since the election) and that's just going to piss everyone off again. Democrats are incapable of learning and Republicans are incapable of changing. We're hosed. the Republican party has changed, its leadership has been overthrown by populist radicals who themselves are in prime position to be replaced by populist radicals who actually have some kind of coherent ideology and plan for what to do with power. Who do you think's going to be operating the guillotines, Che-shirted trustfund leftists?
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Dec 16, 2016 15:51
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