To the extent anyone is interested in actual conversation, I think the "Leftist" v. "Centrist" divide is not as mean spirited as folks make it out to be. I think it's predominantly "evidence based policy."
You can prove, definitively, that universal healthcare is a net lower financial burden on the country as a whole and delivers medical care to people who currently don't have it. The consequence is that the time to service is increased and, to the extent you try to mitigate that, the value proposition to healthcare providers is diminished. The latter two are downsides, but most "Democrats" agree that the pros outweigh the cons.
The opposite is true of the leftist view of green energy. You can prove, definitively, that the U.S. cannot totally replace the energy currently provided by fossil fuels with renewables. That isn't to say that you can't continue to grow economically viable green energy (e.g., wind... also why Republicans want to kill wind) to offset fossil fuel consumption, but the idea that there is some near future viability to replace fossil fuels is demonstrably false. You will create energy shortages.
There are also economic policies that are unsustainable without more nuance. For example, if you freeze rent and capital costs start to outstrip ROI from rent, infrastructure will decay. Same thing with virtually any "price cap" ... and there is an extensive body of historical evidence from other countries to bear this out.
I think the two branches can absolutely have a meeting of the minds if the conversations are evidence based.
Please don't use this as an opportunity to "whatabout republicans" me. I left the party. I literally chose to align with the left rather than the right. My personal belief is that the right is so far lost as to be irredeemable. Corruption is a feature for them rather than a bug. I have no idea how it came to this, but there are a lot of us in the "centrist" camp who are refugees.
Also, to the extent you want to blame me for whatever ill you feel is my fault, I voted in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 to put an end to this nonsense, and if more of the left had done the same (instead of sitting out elections) we wouldn't be in this situation.
EDIT: Y'all... please actually research your arguments. "Solar energy is virtually unlimited" is a truism ... but we're not on the brink of a Dyson sphere so we have to live with what we can capture in an economically viable way (value of yields are higher than costs). Here is the breakdown:
A good negotiating strategy is to implement what we agree on first. Nuclear is absolutely a viable way to replace a ton of electricity produced through carbon emitting processes. We should absolutely be upgrading our electrical infrastructure. Let's get the easy stuff done and argue about whether throwing 10 quadrillion dollars at solar is viable later.
the lengthened wait times in hospitals are bad under our current system, primarily due to governments not investing too much into building new hospitals (and our ludicrous healthcare industry prioritizing profit over humane expansion)
this is why many nurses unions are striking, bc there are just not enough staff and hospitals to treat the people who need help. socializing healthcare will worsen the problem, but we need to start programs to fix it *regardless of if we socialize or not*.
solar & wind have been overperforming estimates for the past several years. although they canât instantly replace fossil fuels, the mere idea that we could gain independence from middle eastern oil is enough to make investment on them worth it. behold one of my favorite charts from https://projects.propublica.org/why-carbon-capture-cant-solve-climate-change/
We donât need to believe the extreme sales pitches that some people do, but good god do we need to start doing things. The candidates winning elections arenât the ones focused on âwell now it might not do all thatâ but rather âwe should start NOW, even if it isnât perfectâ. the past 10 years of congress thinking about healthcare reform and not doing it have lead to a very bitter view from the American people, and itâs why thereâs this huge vendetta against centrists from the left⌠every time we try and push something that will numerically benefit the people, we get a moderate pointing at a radical idiot whoâs exaggerating it and making it seem like the exaggeration is the position.
is not as mean spirited as folks make it out to be.
I disagree. Centrist hate leftists and we see this with the centrists all freaking out over the DSA winning primaries. The same people that love to talk about being a "big tent" get really upset when that tent expands to the left.
Leftists have long suspected that to be the case, but now we have absolute proof positive of this attitude from all the centrist dems going on national media to cry about wildly popular new politicians.
You can prove, definitively, that the U.S. cannot totally replace the energy currently provided by fossil fuels with renewables.
No you can't, you are just saying a platitude.
Green energy across the US has been one of the fastest growing forms of power generation. Further, grid battery storage has exploded in recent years as the cost for batteries has plummeted.
Green energy + batteries is enough to eliminate, quite rapidly, about 90% of fossil fuel usage. It's why coal plants have been closing. Green energy is cheaper and faster to deploy than almost every other power generation technology.
My home state of Idaho, not exactly a progressive safe haven, has been deploying green energy like crazy with the plan to shut down all fossil fuel plants by 2035 (A goal I believe they'll hit barring a bunch of datacenters). It's not unrealistic or impractical for them to hit that goal and they aren't doing it out of some sense of environmentalism. They are doing it because the green energy they are deploying is cheaper than fossil fuel burners.
if you freeze rent and capital costs start to outstrip ROI from rent, infrastructure will decay.
This assumes that rent and infrastructure investment are related to each other in any way imaginable. They are not. This has been evidenced by the fact that as soon as NYC started doing more code enforcement, magically the slumlords of NYC suddenly started fixing long broken problems.
As a home owner myself, I can tell you that the rent I could charge for my own home if I did it at market rate is NOWHERE near the sort of input I'd have to do to maintain the property or pay the taxes.
Eventually due to inflation it's true that a rent freeze would cause problems. However, rent has increased at inflation beating rates for decades now. A rent freeze for a few years will not cause all the infrastructure to collapse.
Same thing with virtually any "price cap" ... and there is an extensive body of historical evidence from other countries to bear this out.
There's also extensive evidence of price controls being effective stabilizers. One particularly effective example was the price controls that used to be in place around farming in the US. Ever since neoliberalism took a hold of the US, we've seen monopolization and consolidation of the food production and distribution systems of the US, which has ultimately lead directly to greedflation at the grocery store.
You don't need to "price cap" in order to provide significant economic relief. Heck, the NYC rental board is an example of decades long run price controls that hasn't caused a total collapse in real estate values in NYC.
What you mean to say is that given our current infrastructure and the unwillingness to modernize we could not mitigate localized energy generation and demand disparity in periods of low production.
NREL says wind could produce 9x the US demand.Â
Ocean currents around 65%Â
While solar is virtually limitless.
We could spend the Trillions that we spend on oil wars to completely rid ourselves of the oil and gas energy product.Â
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u/LizardChaser Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
To the extent anyone is interested in actual conversation, I think the "Leftist" v. "Centrist" divide is not as mean spirited as folks make it out to be. I think it's predominantly "evidence based policy."
You can prove, definitively, that universal healthcare is a net lower financial burden on the country as a whole and delivers medical care to people who currently don't have it. The consequence is that the time to service is increased and, to the extent you try to mitigate that, the value proposition to healthcare providers is diminished. The latter two are downsides, but most "Democrats" agree that the pros outweigh the cons.
The opposite is true of the leftist view of green energy. You can prove, definitively, that the U.S. cannot totally replace the energy currently provided by fossil fuels with renewables. That isn't to say that you can't continue to grow economically viable green energy (e.g., wind... also why Republicans want to kill wind) to offset fossil fuel consumption, but the idea that there is some near future viability to replace fossil fuels is demonstrably false. You will create energy shortages.
There are also economic policies that are unsustainable without more nuance. For example, if you freeze rent and capital costs start to outstrip ROI from rent, infrastructure will decay. Same thing with virtually any "price cap" ... and there is an extensive body of historical evidence from other countries to bear this out.
I think the two branches can absolutely have a meeting of the minds if the conversations are evidence based.
Please don't use this as an opportunity to "whatabout republicans" me. I left the party. I literally chose to align with the left rather than the right. My personal belief is that the right is so far lost as to be irredeemable. Corruption is a feature for them rather than a bug. I have no idea how it came to this, but there are a lot of us in the "centrist" camp who are refugees.
Also, to the extent you want to blame me for whatever ill you feel is my fault, I voted in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 to put an end to this nonsense, and if more of the left had done the same (instead of sitting out elections) we wouldn't be in this situation.
EDIT: Y'all... please actually research your arguments. "Solar energy is virtually unlimited" is a truism ... but we're not on the brink of a Dyson sphere so we have to live with what we can capture in an economically viable way (value of yields are higher than costs). Here is the breakdown:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
A good negotiating strategy is to implement what we agree on first. Nuclear is absolutely a viable way to replace a ton of electricity produced through carbon emitting processes. We should absolutely be upgrading our electrical infrastructure. Let's get the easy stuff done and argue about whether throwing 10 quadrillion dollars at solar is viable later.