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Still Dismal posted:The good news is that party leadership in the US is, compared to other countries, pretty weak, while polarization is strong. So it’s insanely difficult but not impossible. People frequently vaguely phrase this as "we need to gradually elect more leftists," but if you actually think about what would be necessary to exercise high-level political power (which is the kind needed to actually address the most harmful things in our country or caused by it) it's basically like trying to turn New York or California red or something (it's actually significantly worse than this, but it's the best clear analogy I could think of at the moment). There's a flawed logic of "because the left can win some Democratic seats, it is possible to win most of them if we try hard enough," when a significant portion of those seats are effectively unwinnable for the exact same reason solid red places often are (and if anything the most wealthy and populous blue states are some of the worst in this regard, due to the power focused in them). It's basically making the flawed assumption that blue areas are universally at least possibly receptive to the left. It's potentially worthwhile as a way of forcing more direct confrontation (since forcing those with power to more visibly exercise it can at least make a left-wing world-view easier to sell - the wealthy would prefer to be less visible to the general public and simply launder their ideology through media/culture), but significant goals can't be achieved through such bottom-up electoral politics itself (at least not before climate change and other factors make conditions so bad that our society is tearing at the seams). enki42 posted:I think the thing you're missing is anyone I know who identifies as a progressive usually uses real-world results as a barometer for whether they support a position vs. ideology. The most common thing you'll hear from progressives isn't about how things fit into an ideological framework, it's finding actual successes and trying to emulate them, like adopting programs from Scandinavian countries to reduce income inequality. The problem is that such people are no less ideological and are just blind to it. They're essentially taking value judgements and falsely claiming that they're based in some sort of empirical pragmatism.
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Nov 15, 2020 00:44
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Somfin posted:You're just convinced by the propaganda against the left that left ideas are not common sense. It is not "common sense" to let the runaway slave patrols rebrand and keep operating, it is not "common sense" to lock someone in jail for years for ingesting the wrong kind of plant, and it is not "common sense" to put someone into permanent debt slavery because they got sick while not working for the right company. I think what they mean is that "common sense" is essentially defined by culture/media; it's a difficult sell to most people that abolishing police/prisons is a good idea, since most people aren't victims of that aspect of the system (or at least aren't victims to an extent where they oppose it) and live in a society where the idea that "police protect us from the bad guys" is a firmly entrenched view. IMO this is irrelevant (since the only way you can ever reach the point of such things being considered "normal" is to openly and explicitly support them), but it's definitely a thing that makes things more difficult.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:48
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There's no One Weird Trick where changing the voting method (or changing messaging or whatever) will cause the left to become ascendant, because such a thing does nothing to address the fundamental power relationships in our society. The only remotely plausible method is through developing a separate left-wing power-base (which unfortunately has been made next-to-impossible by governments/corporations - most people don't really have the chance to organize - or even develop solidarity - with other workers, and this trend is likely going to escalate further as the "gig economy" continues to expand). Obviously it'd be nice to have a better voting system, and I wouldn't oppose it, but it's not a solution.
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Dec 6, 2020 02:56
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Big Hubris posted:It's the catchphrase of a poster who's used it three times. Posts like that are kind of disturbing, because they're essentially defining the impact of capitalism by the standard of living of the middle class in the world's wealthiest nations, while ignoring the fact that this standard is largely maintained through massive wealth extraction from the global south (and the whole issue of causing climate change). It's basically a view of capitalism that doesn't really account for all the harm it causes, because those things are mostly out of sight and out of mind (or at best viewed in the abstract). The particularly goofy thing about it is that most people with these opinions will agree about the reality of climate change. There's no need to speculate about the harm capitalism will cause - we're already looking at one of the most massive catastrophes in human history being caused by capitalism, but I don't think most people truly grasp this (to be honest, I think most Democrats/liberals just view it as a sort of culture war thing where they're in opposition to the conservatives who don't "believe science" - basically the same thing that's happened with COVID-19).
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Dec 6, 2020 08:34
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OwlFancier posted:loving lol at the idea that anything more left than the liberals being "far left" and impossible. The idea that a government could do anything other than spin its wheels and wage war in the middle east! Utter fantasy! 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. The Oldest Man posted:When that box excludes stuff like closing concentration camps, housing or feeding the destitute, protecting minorities from getting murdered by security forces, or constraining the ability to capital to immiserate more and more people every year, I mostly get it. Because to the average white progressive with a membership card for the PMC, those things are totally abstract, so you can negotiate them away and it doesn't really matter to you. Those objectives can be cast as unobtainable and forgotten when you go home at the end of the day. Don't let the enemy be the perfect of the good, right? At least the progressive option is saying they're against Nazis. 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. Sucrose posted: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. 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. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 07:56
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Man I could not disagree more with the arguments against “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. It’s just a heuristic formulation of the scientific method, and is fundamentally aligned with a Marxist analysis of history and social progress*. Don’t let rationalism blind you from what’s actually happening in front of your eyes. The perfect only exists as an abstract concept, social relations in the real world will, by definition, never be perfect. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s super weird that y’all don’t understand this There are a few key problems with the phrase: - It assumes absolute certainty that one option will be a net lesser evil in the long run - since it's a "pragmatic" judgement, it must by necessity be looking at the net sum impact. In the case of our recent election, it is completely impossible to judge with any certainty whether we'll be in a better or worse position in 10 years if Biden or Trump won. It's essentially trying to insert certainty into a situation where it doesn't exist, because (at least on some level) the people saying this stuff realize that their choices are indefensible on their own merits and must rely upon a pragmatic argument that they're technically better than the alternative. - It erases the degree of differences between the options in question. Frequently "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" is used in situations where the "good" in question is not actually good and is much closer to the partisan alternative than it is anything the left actually wants. - It implies that accomplishing the "good" is made less possible by people advocating for the "perfect" (the phrase would be more accurate - and less compelling because it would no longer make the opposition out to be So Dumb and Crazy - if "perfect" were replaced with "better").
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Dec 8, 2020 01:54
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Sucrose posted: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. I'm not sure what you're even saying here. A good analogy to use in this situation is that, using your logic, you would absolutely not be advocating for ending slavery in, say, 1850. Your explicitly stated logic would cause you to be in conflict with abolitionists - after all, you can't wave a wand and end slavery. It's a mindset that fundamentally doesn't work when those with power are directly opposed to your interests. The point is that most of the harm that is caused is enthusiastically supported by both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Your framing of politics stops making sense once you realize that neither party represents anything remotely resembling progress - they're just different flavors of harming people. For every person helped by Democratic policies, multiple people are hurt by other Democratic policies. So the framing of "we should vote Democratic because, even if we can't achieve everything we want to, it's better to make a little progress than no progress at all" is wrong. The most important thing is to acknowledge the reality that we live in a country where the entire "political establishment" (for lack of a better term) is strongly opposed to what the left wants (and interests of the working class in general). The idea of working with Democrats isn't any more reasonable than the idea of working with Republicans. There's no guaranteed solution to this (and definitely no solution in the short to mid-term), but there will absolutely never be a solution until people at least acknowledge the reality we live in. "Being in opposition to both major parties in our political system" is a pretty hopeless position to be in, but it's still less hopeless than "thinking positive change can come through the Democratic Party."
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Dec 9, 2020 20:33
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KVeezy3 posted:Not if your goal is to obfuscate, as much as possible, that your raison d'être is to preserve the status quo. I mean, we only have to look through history to see how incrementalism has been so good to humanity, right? It's dramatically overgenerous to refer to incrementalism in a discussion like this, because it implies that the Democratic Party's actions are "making things better too slowly," when the reality is that they don't make things better at all on the net, and in fact make a variety of things worse.
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Dec 10, 2020 05:54
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How are u posted:What you're describing is the period of time in which the Boomers have had full and complete control of the levers of power in this country. That isn't going to last forever, and our generation and the one that follows see the world very differently. I strongly disagree with this, mostly because the sort of millennial (or younger) to rise into a position of power will be ones from significant privilege, and being privileged as part of an even more unequal age cohort seems to distort peoples' minds at least as much as being a boomer. It's the same reason wealthy kids in poorer countries aren't magically woke and supportive of the working class. Like If i had to guess about the sort of millennial/zoomer to rise in "progressive" politics, it'll probably end up being people like this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Luh_LRanlFk There's a difference in attitude, but it's more a shift from an explicit belief in a meritocracy to a sort of "noblesse oblige"; in both cases the wealthy/privileged will be unwilling to relinquish their position in society, but younger people feel a need to do more mental gymnastics to convince themselves that what they're doing is actually good and helpful. edit: While younger people will make up a greater portion of the voting population, I'd anticipate a relative decrease in political participation, for the same reason that poorer people in general tend to be less politically engaged.
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Dec 10, 2020 22:47
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How are u posted:I'd never say that Biden is a Progressive. He's a Democratic Party institutionalist through and through, as far as I can tell. I hope that the fact that the Democratic Party has moved left over the last 20 years will influence his policy making decisions. And activists in the streets. Who are you to gate-keep who is progressive? Weren't you just saying that no one has the right to decide what progressive means? Eric Cantonese posted:I apologize for asking this in multiple threads, but who are the big progressive SuperPACs? Are there any? I think that money can be somewhat useful for some low-level races, but that it will never be a solution for actually achieving significant power (since the left will always lose that game). There's also a pretty big problem with large self-defined "progressive" political organizations with significant money involved with them tending to become infested with PMC ladder-climber types (as The Oldest Man mentioned). The Bernie campaign was also victim to this.
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Dec 11, 2020 19:55
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Somfin posted:As it stands there is no way to not be "progressive." There is no set of circumstances under which someone can meaningfully fail the test of being a "progressive" because the test is "did you ever say you are a progressive?" and passing that test means saying, at any point in time, "I am a progressive" or words to that effect. The policy you support or oppose does not actually matter because being a progressive is not a matter of policy or outcomes, it is a matter of sacred words. Well, it depends upon what your goal is. If your goal is "to feel good and optimistic about politics," then it suits you pretty well to believe that the Democratic Party is full of progressive politicians.
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Dec 13, 2020 19:59
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Cpt_Obvious posted:There is a certain brilliance to the angry old youtuber's idea: I think that the most important thing here is unrelated to the MfA vote itself (which wouldn't happen even if AOC or others threatened to withhold support in exchange for it) but more the "loudly and openly talking about the fact that the Democratic Party is opposed to making these things happen." Basically making the conflict open and obvious instead of letting people have the illusion that it's even remotely possible to somehow finagle passing something like MfA with a Democratic Party that has leadership like Pelosi (and worse!). And there won't really be a better time to raise a fuss over MfA specifically than during this pandemic. The perspective a lot of these progressive politicians and public figures have towards the Democratic Party isn't that unlike the perspective Biden has towards Republicans. They're opposed to "openly" conflicting with them or directly acknowledging that they're enemies. I don't know what the solution is to achieving many of the left's goals, but at the very least I know that it sure as hell won't involve cooperation with most of the Democratic Party, and the sooner people realize that the better. I understand the motive for continuing to beat this dead horse - it's a lot easier to be hopeful if you think that we're on a positive path and that if we just Keep Up The Work that we'll be able to pass legislation like MfA - but that will never happen. There are extremely strong motives for the few left-leaning people who manage to be elected to high office to cooperate with the rest of the Democratic Party in order to make their lives easier (I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of currently elected progressives wouldn't actually support MfA if there were a risk of it passing - see Sherrod Brown), and there will never be any turning point where suddenly all the Democratic politicians are voting for MfA.
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Dec 20, 2020 09:16
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twerking on the railroad posted:This is obviously not correct. Say what you will about the affordable care act and it's formation, but it did seriously restrict the health care business. You'll have to elaborate on what you mean here, because as far as I'm aware neither profits nor the size of the industry decreased (I'm not sure if you're talking about health insurance or some other healthcare industry). The ACA also included benefits to insurers to offset the restrictions (which is presumably why you didn't see the industry financially suffer), like the mandate and subsidies that essentially = the government giving insurers a ton of cash.
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Dec 26, 2020 19:41
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twerking on the railroad posted:I'm not an insurance executive or anything close to it so the best I could do would be to guess and that would be a waste of everyone's time. But they're still giving a lot of money to Democrats. And the chart basically supports the idea that the signficiant increase coincided with Republicans making big gains in Congress; the difference is pretty small immediately prior. The picture painted here is "they somewhat prefer Republicans because Republicans might do things that even more directly benefit them" - not "Democrats are hurting them." It's analogous to the situation with the fossil fuel industry. They prefer Republicans, but Democrats also aren't hurting them.
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Dec 27, 2020 07:02
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