American Politics 3.0 - Back to Brunch

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by PeteMoss

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...last-30-years/
https://theweek.com/democrats/100226...ht-statistical
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...lains-how-why/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/democra...ds-11597429469

Basically impossible to compare FDR and politicians from that far back to now. Economics you can argue, socially its such a huge shift that you can't even put them on the same graph.

Being visibly more left socially but not actually doing anything to further human rights or enshrine the rights that have been implemented in the last 50 means that your stance is worth jack ####.

"Oh we love minorities, but we won't do anything but make angry faces and write stern letters to the editor when their rights are trampled upon. Please come photo-op with the 90 year old speaker of the house wearing a dashiki."

[CliffFletcher]

Educated white progressives* claiming to speak for minorities isn’t doing Democrats any favours. Working class Blacks and Hispanics aren’t much different from working class whites on issues like crime, school admissions, and immigration. Local elections in Democrat strongholds are seeing progressives turfed in favour of candidates running on platforms of increasing police presence and abandoning racial schools quotas and doctrinaire educational programs.

But maybe psycnet could offer some examples of the kinds of policies he thinks would win popular support with working class voters. Because raising your fist in righteous fury at the status quo looks good on social media but doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world.

* Progressives are the whitest group in the Democrat coalition.

[CliffFletcher]

This article cites an independent international content analysis party platforms to show that the Democrats have moved left over the last 15 years.

That shift registers on political scientists’ seismographs, too. Data from the Manifesto Project, a corpus of political-party platforms from 50 countries, show that the Democratic Party platform has moved substantially to the left since 2008—shifting from the centre-right to catch up with left-wing parties in Europe like Britain’s Labour and France’s Socialist Party (see chart 1).

Spoiler!

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2...oderate-or-die

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

This article cites an independent international content analysis party platforms to show that the Democrats have moved left over the last 15 years.

Which major leftist policies have they enacted, Cliff?

[GGG]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

This article cites an independent international content analysis party platforms to show that the Democrats have moved left over the last 15 years.

Is this social left or economic left

How come the line in the middle doesn’t move as society changes? Does the article discuss their positions relative to Center or relative to 1970?

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

This article cites an independent international content analysis party platforms to show that the Democrats have moved left over the last 15 years.

That's just not accurate. The only reason the Democrats have shifted left over the past 15 years is because the centerline has shifted extremely right during that period. The Republicans and conservatives in general have shifted to the extreme right. The John Birch Society used to be the extreme of the conservative movement and they are not the center line of that movement. I was talking with an academic friend of mine who is a staunch Reagan conservative and he had to admit that if Reagan were alive and in politics today he would be a left leaning Democrat. Reagan would not recognize the party he was once the poster boy for and would disassociate himself with the vast majority of the people running the show. Reagan sold out to the Christian right, but they have become so radicalized there is no way he would repeat that mistake again.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by rubecube

Which major leftist policies have they enacted, Cliff?

The study analyzes platforms, not legislation. U.S. politics has become dysfunctional at the federal legislative level.

If anyone has any questions about the methodology, they can read the linked content as easily as I can. I brought it up because I read the read the hardcopy article just this morning, so it was timely.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

The study analyzes platforms, not legislation. U.S. politics has become dysfunctional at the federal legislative level.

If anyone has any questions about the methodology, they can read the linked content as easily as I can. I brought it up because I read the read the hardcopy article just this morning, so it was timely.

Unfortunately it’s paywalled.

[Dion]

POS Matt Gaetz is at it again

https://twitter.com/user/status/1551585684196139008

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by GGG

Unfortunately it’s paywalled.

I thought you get one free Economist article a month. Here’s the link to the source for the graph:

https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/

And more of the Economist article itself:

… The drift of the Democratic Party towards its progressive faction has been apparent for a long time. Joe Biden, whose personal policies have shifted with the party’s political winds for decades, is as good a weathervane as any. The lifelong moderate, who once decried mandatory busing to integrate schools in the 1970s and enthusiastically supported welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies in the 1990s, reversed himself completely and ran well to the left of Barack Obama in 2020. Yet he was still the relative moderate of the primary field.

… One year after Floyd’s murder, voters in Minneapolis defeated a referendum to eliminate the police department and replace it with a new department of public safety. City councillors in Austin, Texas, cut the police budget by one-third in 2020, then scrambled to add funding later as homicides spiked. In New York City, voters passed over many progressive champions to elect Eric Adams, a showboating former police captain, as their next mayor. Liberal-leaning suburbanites helped Mr Biden win the state of Virginia by ten points in 2020. Just one year later, fears that schools were being overrun by progressive indoctrination led them to elect Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, as governor.

(graph below shows how out of sync progressives are with popular opinion)

Spoiler!

… In theory, a muscular progressive agenda of bigger social-welfare benefits and public-jobs programmes should be winning over the working class. Instead they have been defecting to the Republicans for nearly a decade. While this erosion has been widely noticed among whites without college degrees, the same trend is wreaking havoc among Hispanic and black voters, many of them socially conservative. Rather than the Democratic Party wooing economically marginalised people of colour and marshalling them to lead the progressive revolution, the proletariat is being lost (see chart 3).

Spoiler!

The warning signs are flashing brightest for Hispanic voters, who were supposed to be the key to the permanent Democratic majority of the future. Between 2016 and 2020, Mr Trump improved his margins among Hispanic voters by a remarkable eight points, the largest shift among any major ethnic group. A hardline immigration policy and the campaign to build a wall hardly deterred Hispanic voters in border states like Texas and Florida, which swung even more strongly Republican.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

The study analyzes platforms, not legislation. U.S. politics has become dysfunctional at the federal legislative level.

Well BFD then. The Dems always talk a big game when it comes to campaign promises to get progressives on board, but abandon them pretty quickly once they gain power.

[opendoor]

The Manifesto Project has some pretty serious flaws, and some of it's conclusions simply don't stand up to scrutiny. For instance, the Pierre Trudeau Liberals were positioned to the right of their Progressive Conservative opponents for most of the '70s based on it. Relying on campaign platforms is probably a fatal flaw, both because parties commonly campaign one way and govern another, and because incumbents will often run relatively conservative, defensive campaigns.

But even if we take it at face value, the Democratic Party (assuming they governed like they campaigned) would simply be returning to the position on the spectrum it occupied from WWII to the mid-1980s, a period which coincided with its electoral domination. On the other hand, the shift rightward based on that chart precipitated their worst electoral fortunes in a century, where they lost 10 of 12 House elections.

And unfortunately, the Democrats aren't moving left on the economic issues that can probably gain them traction among the working class, but rather focusing on token culture war issues that probably alienate more people than they attract.

And to be charitable to them, it's not even totally their fault given how ridiculous campaign financing is in the US these days. It's probably unlikely that anyone who offends the donor class is going to be able to run a high profile national campaign, so much like the Republicans, they're beholden to moneyed interests.

[bob-loblaw]

Originally Posted by Dion

POS Matt Gaetz is at it again

https://twitter.com/user/status/1551585684196139008

Not sure what to say about this clown.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1551665933621403648

[Yamer]

Originally Posted by Dion

POS Matt Gaetz is at it again

https://twitter.com/user/status/1551585684196139008

Aww, that's adorable. He thinks he's George Carlin.

[direwolf]

Man, that dude is such a scummy, reprehensible piece of s***. Easily the most punchable face in U.S. politics these days, right up there with Jordan, Hawley, and Manchin.

[JohnnyB]

He really encapsulates a lot of the American mainstream cultural spirit in that speech.

[corporatejay]

Originally Posted by rubecube

Well BFD then. The Dems always talk a big game when it comes to campaign promises to get progressives on board, but abandon them pretty quickly once they gain power.

But doesn't that further prove Cliff's point? What is the dems strategy?

"Hey working class latinos, sure these policies seems preposterous and out of touch but don't worry, these guys lie just to get elected, they won't actually do any of it"

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by corporatejay

But doesn't that further prove Cliff's point? What is the dems strategy?

"Hey working class latinos, sure these policies seems preposterous and out of touch but don't worry, these guys lie just to get elected, they won't actually do any of it"

That proves the study is flawed. You can't judge the political bias of a group by what they say, you base it on their actions and outcomes they generate. The whole strategy by many white nationalist groups is frame their position in non-extremist rhetoric so it sounds reasonable on the surface, but their actions are still racist and violent against non-whites. So based on the methods of this study we should believe that these groups have shifted further to the left rather than judging them on their actions and outcomes and finding they have maintained their position on the extreme right? Measuring platforms is ridiculous because politics is outcome focused.

If you want to see the impact of platforms all you need to study are these two sites.

https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7...islation%22%7D

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse

These will tell you everything you need to know about congress and efficacy of their platforms. Democrats present a lot of ideas, but the Republicans are excellent at killing them off before they have a chance to take root. The purity of the Republican voting block makes the Democrats enacting anything that counter the extremism on the right impossible, and then makes the continued shift to the right the norm.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald

That proves the study is flawed. You can't judge the political bias of a group by what they say, you base it on their actions and outcomes they generate. The whole strategy by many white nationalist groups is frame their position in non-extremist rhetoric so it sounds reasonable on the surface, but their actions are still racist and violent against non-whites. So based on the methods of this study we should believe that these groups have shifted further to the left rather than judging them on their actions and outcomes and finding they have maintained their position on the extreme right? Measuring platforms is ridiculous because politics is outcome focused.

If you want to see the impact of platforms all you need to study are these two sites.

https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7...islation%22%7D

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse

These will tell you everything you need to know about congress and efficacy of their platforms. Democrats present a lot of ideas, but the Republicans are excellent at killing them off before they have a chance to take root. The purity of the Republican voting block makes the Democrats enacting anything that counter the extremism on the right impossible, and then makes the continued shift to the right the norm.

Wouldn’t we like to know if given unlimited power what would a group do?

It’s like Jason Kenny, he sucks at implementing policy to move Alberta further right then he would if he were competent. That doesn’t make him less fat right it makes him not good at his jobs.

Outcomes in the US are even more limited because of the number of checks and balances and because the Republicans are very effective at preventing change. So basing policy outcome as your sole measure of left vs right is flawed as it’s unable to distinguish between policy and competence at implementing policy.

This isn’t an either/or situation it’s a combination of both.

[PeteMoss]

Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald

That proves the study is flawed. You can't judge the political bias of a group by what they say, you base it on their actions and outcomes they generate. The whole strategy by many white nationalist groups is frame their position in non-extremist rhetoric so it sounds reasonable on the surface, but their actions are still racist and violent against non-whites. So based on the methods of this study we should believe that these groups have shifted further to the left rather than judging them on their actions and outcomes and finding they have maintained their position on the extreme right? Measuring platforms is ridiculous because politics is outcome focused.

If you want to see the impact of platforms all you need to study are these two sites.

https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7...islation%22%7D

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse

These will tell you everything you need to know about congress and efficacy of their platforms. Democrats present a lot of ideas, but the Republicans are excellent at killing them off before they have a chance to take root. The purity of the Republican voting block makes the Democrats enacting anything that counter the extremism on the right impossible, and then makes the continued shift to the right the norm.

Nothing gets passed by either side in the US anymore. The US federal government is in a constant state of stasis because of the filibuster. The only thing either side can pass is through reconciliation. Its not a Democrat vs Republican thing. Its just the Republicans don't particularly have any big legislative asks right now so they don't care as much.