That’s not a defining characteristic of the left, any more than it is of the right. IOW, the same thing can be found regardless of the political spectrum. That doesn’t stop some from repeating the trope as if it were fact, and others nodding sagely in agreement.
Most of the concerns of the left about the right are about the far right.
That’s kind of an assumption.
I don’t know. A lot on the normal right already complain about taxes being too high, and then turn around an complain about the roads or about office hours or about police speed traps.
My father in law, your classic conservative NRA member, was very impressed with how nice the street and the roads where when he visited my family in the Netherlands and how people didn’t seem all that stressed out and there was a lack of obvious poverty. He really enjoyed the train system as well.
All I could think was that you get what you pay for. In the Netherlands, there is a much higher tax rate, and for that they get better roads, near universal healthcare, free hire education and a hefty safety net. It means fewer people buying cars or 55 inch televisions, but also fewer people on the street. You get what you pay for. If you aren’t willing to pay for public services or pay for talent, you don’t get either.
True, but what I take away is that produces a visceral antipathy which reinforces the separation between liberals and conservatives. The separation itself arises out of a difference in principles IMO, but the toxic partisanship of the current era then exacerbates the breach.
Also, the extremes of both sides are to blame here, but the problem in modern American is that the “extreme left” is maybe 2 to 3% of voters, 5% at the outside, whereas the “extreme right” has swallowed most of the reasonable right and now constitutes something like 35% to 40% of voters. In other words, both sides are participating in the vicious cycle, but the right wing has an order of magnitude more participants.
One thing I would suggest to the non-liberals on this forum: think about the visceral anger you feel towards the extreme left, which is probably less than 5% of voters and then think about how we liberals feel about the extreme right which is roughly 10X as big. That huge chunk of the right becoming so extreme in recent decades is the engine that drives that train IMO. That’s not an excuse for idiocy on the left, but it does explain why so many run of the mill liberals are so damn angry these days.
I realize this post is a diversion from the main topic, but for me, the discussion in this thread is giving some insight into both sides.
Disagree. I have many problems with the mainstream right. And I’m not even that far left. I’m a free-trade, pro-market guy–your Matt Yglesias liberal, if you will.
I believe the term you are looking for is moderate. Don’t allow far right extremist make you feel like a liberal just because you believe in common sense.
I say this despite being a liberal.
I always preferred the Tin Man but go on…
Block grants were specifically what I was referring to, but even in the broader case, the point still stands - if you relied only on local taxes, you would have far fewer resources to solve these problems in the places that need those resources the most. If you replaced income tax (or some portion of it) with some sort of charitable giving mandate, you would most likely see a similar disparity (unless you required that the giving be to national charities). If you taxed the money away from people and then donated it to charities, you would have the “picking winners and losers” problem. Even a “tax, then offer as matching funds” solution has problems with deciding which charities qualify for the matching funds, and making sure donations are real. Perhaps that would be the best system for improve social welfare, but do you have the same statistical backup for your belief that charities can solve these problems that you do for your belief that the Feds are wasting money?
The War on Poverty has been inefficient at best, the War on Drugs a disaster, and the War on Terror possibly an even bigger one (depending on what you fold in under that header). But other programs have been great successes, like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. So I remain curious whether your dislike of Federal government solutions is based specifically on some science that convinced you there was a better solution, or whether the science you trust is the stuff that backs up a pre-existing distrust of “involuntary taxes” or inefficient bureaucracies.
I will freely admit that from the liberal side I have a distrust of most charities because I see them as tools of missionaries (though of course I give to public radio when I can), and I have not looked for any research to determine whether they are more effective at accomplishing social goals than the Feds are. I recall being quite excited when I thought Obama was going to create a national public service that could redirect some of this energy from local community organizers towards larger, better-run, better-researched goals. Why do I think that’s the best way? Because I worry that the unshepherded market bends towards arbitrary and unproductive goals, so just leaving it to all the charities and letting market forces sort them out seems like trying to get a rocket to the moon by setting off fireworks underneath the command module.
I think charities come both good and bad, effective and totally ineffective. Some do nothing but raise money for a single cause while others actually do something.
But the problem with saying charities can take over is that there are no large charities capable of replacing the government dollars. And without the dollars nothing can get done.
It’s also an issue of macro vs micro scale. A local and focused charity might provide better than a national problem. So at the micro level the charity might be the best for that community.
But at the macro level those local charities will be incomplete, have gaps in coverage. Some areas might be overserved, while others have no service. See college endowments, and the disparity there.
So if you are looking at measuring which solution provides for the largest number of people, with the fewest gaps? It may very well be federal programs.
So the answer isn’t probably, in many areas, all of one none of the other. It may be a federally run public/ private partnership. National program that works with local groups where possible, but a federal solution for when one is not available. Of course this has its own issues, what criteria would local programs be evaluated and chosen on, but it’s far better than saying ‘cut federal programs and make all social programs charity based’.
Well I dislike extremes in general. So Liberalism and Conservatism are both guilty of this…as long as we are applying labels, which I detest. Everyone I ever met is the exception to partisan politics, which make it hard for me to understand the Internet at times.
I suppose maybe Liberal, or progressive…maybe more apt would be Radical left: as in change now, fast, or soon. I’m more about boiling the frog to avoid an incident. I don’t want anyone to die. Political violence is repugnant.
Am I allowed to say that I’ve read the criticisms of liberals and liberalism here, and I don’t recognize any actual liberals or liberalism pointed to by those criticisms? Similarly, I’ve read the comments about conservatism by conservatives, and it doesn’t look like any actual conservatism we’re living with in the real world. I’m inclined to argue against these straw men, but that’s against the spirit of the thread. That said, posting critiques of straw man liberal positions also seems, to me, to be against the spirit of the thread.
How about this, if anyone cares to answer:
Was Obama in your view a liberal? If so, what aspects of his liberalism, or what liberal policies he proposed, did you dislike? And why?
Yeah a lot of the issues here seem to be a generalization of democrats and moderates. Pretty much anything not old school republican or conservative.
I have a question that can’t be answered easily because we don’t have good data for it.
What percentage of the population is moderate? Discount say, libertarians and communists. Discount the far right and far left.
What percentage of Americans are socially progressive and fiscally conservative? Or however you define moderate.
I’ve heard figures, no way to back this up, but figures of 10/10/80. Thoughts?
10/10/80? How are you defining the groupings and which factions are the 10s and the 80?
Sorry. 10% far right, 10% far left, 80% in the middle.
That 80% don’t vote in primaries, which is why we get such worthless partisan candidates a lot of the time. It’s also why the Dems and Repubs can enjoy a pretty much unchallenged two party system.
That’s a bit silly, imo. There’s intuitively a bell curve distribution to public opinions (this may or may not be true) but if the center of that curve is MAIM KILL BURN you’re probably not looking at a moderate political system in any sense that we’d consider moderate. But that leads to the larger problem of defining what moderate actually means.
To a liberal, for ex., they may consider themselves moderate if they believe abortion should be normal and government provided and assisted. A conservative otoh would/may see that as “radical” and that a “moderate” would believe in banning abortion except for medical necessity and sexual violence (a “non-moderate” conservative would ban abortion in every instance or something).
If both sides can’t agree on what a “middle ground” position would be i find it hard to accept one definition of moderation over another.
Well 40% of the electorate approves of Trump so the far right has to be at least that large. Also, you don’t have a category between moderate and far left, which is where most QT3ers are.
It all depends on definition, but in terms of identifiable chunks of population, the US electorate right now is something like this:
40% Trump supporters/Fox News viewers/Rush Limbaugh listeners/Breitbart readers, typically all of most of those at once.
5% Never Trump Republicans and/or “true moderates” and/or “ex-Republicans”.
15% weakly aligned, mostly low information voters. Not highly partisan. I don’t use the term “moderate here” as I would mostly define this group by apathy/lack of interest in the political news cycle as opposed to moderation.
35% “mainstream liberal” basically Democrats, and many self defined “Progressives”.
5% “far left” including the Bernie Bros, Democratic Socialistists, Penbladians and adjacent.
A huge facet of contemporary American politics is that a far right ideology, actually to the right of the John Birch Society of the 60s, now dominates the GOP and encompasses the staggering number of roughly 40% of voters. A society can tolerate a few percent of extremists out at the fringes, but 40%, man, that’s rough.
I agree, moderate is exceptionally hard to define and would certainly vary from nation to nation. For instance a moderate here would probably be a conservative in Europe since they routinely elect actual socialists and such.
Let’s stick with America to narrow our terms. My thought is we might be able to define it through polls about issues, but then you get into how polls are run and how questions are phrased.
A ephemeral definition, I admit. According to your definition, what’s your guess? Or are you inclined to reject the whole category framework?
From this I draw two conclusions:
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You’ve never heard of the Equal Protection clause, and
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You don’t know what the 9th amendment says.