The Progressive Movement and the American Left

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Progressive Movement and the American Left

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

This is probably horribly na�ve but right now I'm convinced that the best way forward is to destroy the two-party system and the best way to destroy the two-party system is Ranked Choice Voting initiatives.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2020 17:40

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 16:16

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

The Oldest Man posted:

The problem of progressivism is that, as you can see in this thread, its adherents want to fight on the grounds of being non-ideological and advancing "common sense reform." It's like trying to build a house on top of sand; the ideology is there, it's just unacknowledged and therefore its destructiveness to what progressives want to build on top of it is unaddressed. When progressives have an electoral victory and the first few bricks of the progressive agenda are laid, they fall apart, whether by lobbyists or conservative democrats intentionally or progressives themselves being insufficiently ambitious as to what's possible during the legislative drafting phase, which sabotages the programs being built by co-opting the "common sense" or "this is what's possible" framings that progressives love, or soon after when the progressive tide ebbs for a moment.

Just look at Obamacare; a lot of progressives still point to it as some kind of victory even as medical debt and bankruptcy continues to rise, health outcomes continue to collapse, and the theoretical goal of the bill (to make healthcare affordable to everyone by forcing less risky people into the pool) has totally failed. The only measure of success that actually shows it to be a win (more people who technically have health insurance) was fabricated by insurance industry lobbyists!

The problem progressives don't want to acknowledge is that they are fighting on ground from which they cannot win. You can't write a good healthcare program with the help of the insurance industry. You can't end racist, murderous policing with cops at the table. You can't pass a legitimate solution to climate change with input from Shell and Chevron. You can't fight COVID when the Chamber of Commerce gets a say. Our most pressing problems cannot by solved via a compromise with the incumbent players. The solutions are only attainable when the power of those incumbents is utterly broken. And progressivism, by failing to address that the liberal capitalist ideology it silently accepts will always empower those incumbents, implicitly limits itself to that kind of compromise and the resulting failure to achieve the ends that progressives will endlessly pursue but never reach.

You might as well talk about ending the injustice of slavery without being willing to accept first that the economic and political power of slavers must be destroyed.

I feel like a major problem with the left is that once you go far enough left all energy for forward movement gets sucked away by people like this assuring you that trying to make things better is hopeless because Capitalism itself isn't being destroyed.

And Capitalism itself is never going to be destroyed, because a better system to replace it doesn't actually exist in the real world.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2020 17:45

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

enki42 posted:

Doesn't ranked choice tend to favour compromise, centrist parties? (and therefore encourages a very small number of "big-tent" parties that are marginally acceptable to everyone). That's always how it's been viewed in Canada, where most folks advocate for proportional representation instead so that non-centrist viewpoints get a voice and there's fewer opportunities for majority governments with minimal checks on their power.

It's gotta be an improvement over our current "there's only two parties, and if you want to make a protest vote it's going to actively help the party that you hate most" system.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2020 18:12

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

The Oldest Man posted:

Yeah that's definitely how it's panned out in such leftist paradise states as *checks notes* Australia

Considering that Australia has one of the highest Inequality-Adjusted HDI scores on the planet, I'm not sure what point you were possibly trying to make here.

In fact this post might possibly perfectly encapsulate the problem among some Leftists of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Oh no, we wouldn't want our country to go in the direction of Australia, a country with universal healthcare and which is consistently ranked as having some of the best quality of life ratings for its average citizens on earth.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Dec 3, 2020

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 06:16

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

The Oldest Man posted:

I was making a joke that ranked choice voting has not given Australia the slightest pause in its pursuit of exclusionary policies against migrants and ethnic minorities and the indigenous but go off

Again, you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Racist immigration policies are bad. So is letting thousands of people die without health coverage. In the United States, we have both.

Unless you can make the argument that adopting ranked choice voting would somehow make the US more racist, it's not an argument against ranked choice voting.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Dec 3, 2020

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 08:36

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

The Oldest Man posted:

And you're attributing UHC to ranked choice voting here?

I attribute lack of it in the US to political corruption/strength of the health insurance lobby here, which is made easier by the two-party system. Of course I'm not saying that getting rid of the two-party system would rid the US of corruption, a loooot more work would need to be done; it would just be an improvement over the current system and a step in the right direction.

The Oldest Man posted:

I actually think rcv is more or less irrelevant to outcomes but in countries without it, it acts as one of those bug zapper policy ideas for wonky liberals to tilt at that serves to suck air out of the room for anything that might actually make someone's life better.

Like what? I mean among policies that could actually be accomplished in the next 10-20 years.

Also, advocating for ranked choice voting is definitely not "wonky." It's something that can actually be accomplished fairly quickly and easily through voter referendums so long as the political will is there.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Dec 3, 2020

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 08:42

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

KVeezy3 posted:

Right, the sanctimony behind the phrase, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good", relies on an extremely advantageous framing of the situation. Liberals want to take all the credit for the 'lives they save', but refuse to take responsibility for a single life doomed in the process, which allows them to take a moral high ground. The fact that they get to keep their hands clean while their own situation remains fortuitous is conveniently left unacknowledged, when the truth is that that is what they cherish most of all as an unconditional requisite of their approval.

They continue to use this rhetorical trick despite untrammeled technocratism in the last 30 years. In the latest iteration, now that the election is over and we're no longer useful, the Democratic party has already begun the predictable purging of leftist ideas. But it's the unreasonable leftists with no structural power who are preventing technocratism from reaching its highest potential.

Progressives are the people out there actually getting poo poo done, while those further to the left sit and wax philosophical like this about how liberals �refuse to take responsibility for a single life doomed in the process� as if the actual alternative to liberalism in the real world was Leftism and not social-service-cutting conservatism.

Out there in reality, progressives and liberals aren�t squaring off with Leftists over what bills get passed and what gets done, they�re squaring off with right-wing politicians who don�t care one iota about climate change and who would love to let the poor go hungry and cut health care funding to as many people as they can. Why Leftists take potshots at progressives rather than the entire half of the political divide that�s actively making things worse is beyond me.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Dec 7, 2020

# ¿ Dec 7, 2020 02:11

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

The reason it's not is because all the liberals want their point of view to be the only alternative, they don't want anything better.

You don't get to claim that you're doing everyone a favour by being in the way of much better alternatives.

And I hate to tell you but you're not doing so hot on being an alternative looking at the last few decades of your governance.

Every time you get near power you do sweet gently caress all and then when you inevitably poo poo the bed and hand the right power again all you ever come out with is "you have to vote for us again because otherwise they'll get in" as if your miserable excuse for governance has nothing to do with the fact you keep losing to them.

Well, this is precisely why I want to end the two-party system in the US, so that we�re not stuck voting for the lovely party or the even-shittier party. The Democratic establishment might feel more pressure to actually serve the working class of the country if they were actually threatened by a third party, instead of knowing that everyone�s forever going to come crawling back to them because we have a voting system where attempting to vote for a third party just means helping the major party you least like.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2020 02:25

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

There is no creature on the face of the earth more pathetic than a liberal.

You are the epitome of what�s wrong with the far-left. One out of our two parties is currently infested with Nazis, but yes, it�s liberals who are the real threat to humanity.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2020 02:28

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

Read it again and engage your brain. The liberals are the ones who cover for the far right, you may take it as somehow axiomatic that they are not part of the problem but I do not. Read, and think. Or don't and keep up this facile idea that we just need another liberal government and somehow this time it will do something other than nothing while handing power back to the right in a few years.

For a political affiliation that so adores personal responsibility your kind are remarkably adept at ignoring responsibility for your failures in power. Something you absolutely have in common with your kindred across the aisle.

Liberals don�t cover for the far-right, you�re just a wing-nut. Your type are never going to get into power, so what good does your sniping at the moderate left even do? Nothing.

You live in a fantasy world where you think far-left ideas are going to catch on and get your type into power if only you win enough internet arguments. It�s never going to happen.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2020 02:38

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Ytlaya posted:

One of the most ironic things is the way "nothing matters" is used as a pejorative on these forums, because there's really nothing more cynical and hopeless than the belief that anything outside of mainstream Democratic politics is impossible.

Regarding "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," I think the biggest issue is that the people who say this just tacitly accept everything harmful about the status quo and don't view those things as "active harm."

So the end result is that they view "hurting a bunch of people (as long as it's marginally fewer than before)" as "helping people," because they don't really process everything else. You should focus on the people helped by the ACA or DACA, but you can't include the even greater number of people who had their lives ruined/ended through other actions/policies. The former matter, while the latter are written off as inevitable.

The key misunderstanding here is that you seem to be under the impression that net positive progress occurs under Democrats, even if it might not be ideal. This is not the case. The overwhelming majority of harm (that becomes even more overwhelming if you decide to include climate change in the analysis) has bipartisan support, and Democratic administrations generally cause more harm than they help. The ACA may have saved ~20,000 lives, but it's doubtful that the benefits from it outweigh the harm caused by both foreign and immigration policy. Your perspective only makes sense if you ignore all the bad things.

The Democratic Party is a right-wing political party. The most reasonable way to view our political system is that our political parties are just two different right-wing factions. The really important thing to understand here is that both the Republican and Democratic Party are equally opposed to most things the left wants. There is no question of degree here. They're both firmly opposed, and the same way both "moderate" Republicans and Trump are both firmly opposed. There's no left-right continuum where moving to the left on it makes someone more open to ideas further to the left. These people have their own ideologies that simply stand in opposition to that of the left.

People have used the Trolley Problem to try and explain why the left is wrong, but a more accurate analogy is a Trolley Problem where both tracks have millions of people on them and you can't even tell which has more until an accounting is done after the fact.

edit: Another way to look at our political system is that it's essentially a good cop/bad cop situation. Both generally agree on what they want to do to you, but people end up with an exaggerated perception of the difference between them due to a difference in rhetoric/tone. Climate change is the best example of this. There is zero meaningful difference between the parties on this; neither are willing to do anything. It's not the difference between "no solution" and "an insufficient solution" - it's the difference between spitting on a fire vs doing nothing. The Democratic position on climate change is closer to the Republican position than it is any remotely reasonable position, but people perceive it as being a greater distinction because they rhetorically acknowledge it.

The question is, compared to what? What's the alternative to our current society? We have to work with the society we've got, not an ideal fantasy version of it.

quote:

Regarding "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," I think the biggest issue is that the people who say this just tacitly accept everything harmful about the status quo and don't view those things as "active harm."

The status quo is our starting point. We can't just do away with it. We can't wave a wand and stop all the "harms" that are happening. We have to look at the status quo, and see where things can be improved and where people's lives can be made better. People don't have any healthcare coverage, that's a problem. Single-payer healthcare programs work fine in other countries and there's no realistic reason they couldn't work here, so that's something to advocate for. In the meantime getting more people access to healthcare is good, people getting kicked off their coverage, like when Medicaid eligibility is narrowed, is bad.

Our government pointlessly bombing people with drones, that's a problem. That's something we should be constantly advocating against, and we should be voting for the most anti-interventionist, pacifistic candidates we can. What else can we realistically do about it?

The same with all the other problems in the status quo. There's problem after problem after problem, but the only thing to do is tackle each problem one at a time and advocate for better policies. We can't just wipe the slate clean of all problems and "harms" in our society, because that's not something that's possible. This is the society we live in, this is what we've got to work with.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2020 16:16

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 16:16

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

punk rebel ecks posted:

Would I be stupid to think that there could actually be a third party that will actually make waves in ten years time?

Yes, because third parties are impossible in a first-past-the-post voting system.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2020 16:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Progressive Movement and the American Left