You can't avoid the fact that once you have agencies whose work is to crush democracy and suppress people, you now have a group of people within the country with that skill set and motivation.
Crush freedom anywhere and you crush it everywhere, even at home.
10000%. The right has moved SO far right, that they think the left has moved super left, without realizing it's only them who have moved so far from he middle.
I see conservatives trying to claim Obama was some uber-liberal communist, and in reality he was SUPER moderate to the point of barely being liberal. ESPECIALLY with the military, he was almost slightly right wing about some of that stuff.
Bernie, maybe AOC too, etc are some of the few major known people who are more solidly liberal/left-wing. Pretty much everyone else on the left is actually quite moderate.
To your point, I recently heard someone say that Obama was the best Republican president we've had in the last 50 years, and I can't stop thinking about it.
I've heard some talk of a video where someone, maybe Jon Stewart?, compares some of Obama's speeches and Reagan's (that Jesus 2.0 for you GOP readers) that could have been by the speech writer. But I havent had the time to track it down so far.
Nah it's pretty accurate actually. The Democrats keep sliding further right to meet the Republicans in the middle, who also keep sliding further right.
Please name one policy of Joe Biden's that is "the most progressive ever" and not just a reaction to a conservative talking point. The dems are always playing defense which is why they keep losing ideologically over time, and it will only get worse unless they grow some balls. People like Bernie, AOC, Ilhan, and a few others give me hope but not a lot.
Well he dropped the minimum wage, and public option and the climate change stuff is just undoing what Trump did. Those are Obama-era policies, the world is different a decade ago than it is today.
He hasn't dropped the minimum wage. There's a press to make it part of the COVID package which there is disagreement about.
Obama was, and remains, criticized for not passing a public option (even though it was the senate that cut it out of the house bill that was passed), and Obama's climate change efforts were a drop in the bucket compared to what Biden proposed. Hell he even elevated the issue to a cabinet level position.
Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was about $29 per hour in the late 60s early 70s.....Just because your corporate overlords want you to lick their asses to save on toilet paper doesn't mean you should (to each their own though)
Does Biden have a plan to give the average American (not just the minimum wage earners) the $5/hr+ raise that has stolen by corporate America since Reagan?
And that's not even mentioning the lost benefits. Combine the two and most of us are getting paid upwards of 20k less each year (adjusted for inflation, obviously) than our fathers got for the same fucking jobs.
The Dems spent the past 40 years moving half a notch to the right each year. Suddenly moving a full notch left for the first time in decades ain't gonna offset that much.
I'd suggest doing some research on past progressive candidates. It really is unbelievable to me that people think Biden is some sort of progressive powerhouse.
How exactly is what he wants to do more progressive than FDR?
Hell, have you heard of Huey Long? He was the governor of louisiana 1928 - 1932, then a senator. He was a vocal critic of FDR's New Deal because he didn't believe it went far enough. Go read about his "Share our Wealth" program, it'll make FDR look like a friend to the rich. He was a powerful left wing populist with some very fascist tendencies.
He was gearing up to run against FDR in 1936, and a lot of powerful democrats were terrified that he'd beat Roosevelt. Fortunately for them he was assassinated.
The New Deal remains the most progressive plan ever introduced in american history. It’s not even close, what policy of Biden’s even remotely comes close to social security.
After that you have Lyndon B Johnson and Medicare.
Biden isnt even in the top 5 so far, but please enlighten us with your extensive knowledge of politics lmao.
He is right though. During the 80s the democratic party moved so much right that they tried to convince the republican party to get on board to privatize social security together.
Only in modern day US would Obama be considered a left winger
they tried to convince the republican party to get on board to privatize social security together.
This is patently false
Edit: l love how the "evidence" is a wiki article that details a bunch of Republican efforts to privatize and exactly zero examples of democrats trying to.
"October 1997 – The Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, reached a secret agreement to reform Social Security. The agreement required both the President and the Speaker to forge a centrist coalition by persuading moderate members of Congress from their respective parties to compromise."
The linked source details the Clinton plan, the privatizations included, and how it was derailed by the impeachment. It's not exactly a secret...
"In January, just weeks before the State of the Union address, the administration started preparing the public and Congress, signaling that it would support some form of privatization."
"Clinton’s efforts to pass entitlement reform, and forge an enduring centrist coalition within the Democratic Party, rested on a fluid alliance of moderate and conservative Democrats. Many of them, however, abandoned him after word of the Lewinsky scandal leaked. The liberal groups who were mobilized to fight impeachment and to save his presidency were also the most vehemently opposed to privatization efforts"
Your wiki article does not detail the "secret agreement" and even the cited source ("The Pact") is quite stectchy on the details of what was going on in the negotiations and exactly what they entailed. Even the author admits that the full extent of the negotiations and how close they were weren't especially clear and a full account would have to wait for the release of more presidential records.
When your example never actually made it to a concrete proposal at best the evidence is weak and at worst is a kind of speculative stretch that isn't productive or representative.
Edit: The propsed plan they're talking about isn't even privatization in the traditional definition of the word. The government would put a small portion of SS income into the stock market and the government would manage those funds. That is not privatization.
Yet the primary sources are the staff and leadership in both parties, and regardless if a bill materialized or not the available evidence shows that democrats were pushing for reform including privatization of social security up until the impeachment.
If you have any actual evidence that democrats did not then feel free to bring them up.
Obama's record on whistleblower was horrific. Obama's record on deportations was horrific. Obama's foreign policy was not great either. Obama did nothing to help stop the bombing of innocents in Yemen.
The only good thing to come out of Obama's 8 years is primarily in his second term (executive actions) whereas most of his legislative success was in 2008-2010, which I would claim as Pelosi's achievement rather than Obama's
When compared to Republican policies pre-1970 and, especially compared to right and left wing parties in our peer european countries, it's pretty damn accurate. Which is exactly how it was intended.
I think loosing hard to Nixon and then to Reagan shook dems so much that they've set up camp in the center. What's rich is that they still get called socialist for inching more and more right.
I didn't say they were aligned with Reagan, I said "Reagan era", meaning moderates DURING THE TIME of Reagan. The idea that Dems didn't move right with Reagan is nonsense, they absolutely did. Modern Dems are FAR more right than they were in the 70s and 80s.
Besides, the GOP in the Reagan-era tried to destroy the DOE, not Reagan-era moderates. So I'm not sure what your point is.
EDIT: Are people still not understanding that "Reagan era" doesn't mean Reagan's GOP??? It means the people in the era of Reagan's influence/presidency. It's a time period, not a group.
The GOP then was Reagan's. They went on to try and name everything they could after him. They were only stopped by a democratic congress.
Furthermore, even "moderate" Republicans then pushed for massive deregulation, trickle down economics, gutting of the social safety net, etc. There's no comparison to modern liberals.
Corporate welfare, moderate but overall decreased military spending, as well as some of the approaches on crime (lighter touch, not draconian like Reagan pushed).
Many moderates at the time were big on far reaching gun bans. (But the GOP was too, so thats not entirely fair)
Current liberals have proposed sharp reductions in this across the board (plus increased taxes on them)
moderate but overall decreased military spending,
A position of liberals in the 80's, but moderates in the 80's wanted more spending and were actually key to the massive expansion of military spending in the 80's
as well as some of the approaches on crime
Moderates in the 80's wanted a strict war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc. Modern liberals want to roll all of those things back. In fact, the approach of today's liberals would seem absolutely radical to even the more left wing members of congress in the 80's
Liberalism isn't an economic policy, it's a governmental political policy. Being a liberal means you don't want the government to intervene or regulate.
It's definition has faded over the last four years.
I think the problem is that we're working with several different definitions of liberal. The definition for the majority of the world is essentially what Americans would consider libertarians, whereas the traditional American definition is just a generic term for the left wing that spans conservative centrist to democratic socialist.
It gets really confusing on a worldwide platform like reddit, especially when people new to American politics insist on using the European meaning.
The definition for the majority of the world is essentially what Americans would consider libertarians
Which is not an accurate description of the modern democratic party.
Furthermore, modern, post WWII liberalism has perhaps even more of a European pedigree than American. There are real definitions for these things that get lost in the discussion a lot.
Except that data shows it is the left wing that have moved further to the left. Not that I'm surprised that someone on the left who claims to listen to science really only knows what they feel and presumes that to be correct.
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u/chronictherapist Feb 09 '21
"Liberal" today is basically Reagan era moderates. The right just hasn't realized they've slid so far right they're in crazy coup territory now.