Shug on 5/9/2012 at 02:09

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You can be extremely boring and pedantic when replying to people.

demagogue on 5/9/2012 at 03:51

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Real "Left" in the classic late-19th Cent/early-20th Cent sense isn't really viable as a mainstream position and is rather fringe, I think. I mean there was a specific time (as Tony Judt's book tells it anyway) when the left mainstream parties in Europe & the UK (not even the far-left ones, the "moderate" ones) had to remove or moderate the language in their constitutions about the end goal still being workers' control over the means of production and all that spiel (whether by authoritarianism or the "anarcho" route maybe). But if it'd been like 1912, trying to remove that would have meant you're abandoning the very raison d'etre of being Left altogether and you are now Center or Right whatever else you say. So what we mean by left today is already a kind of artificial construct that isn't particularly old I think: "1912 French guy: So you're saying you want a basically liberal market AND protection for peasants? Wha...?" Edit: Well it's Keynes & that line, and the New Deal brand of left in the US, which is why those made such a splash at the time I think, since it let people otherwise in the center still feel like they could pull left.

Also, I was never clear practically speaking what that bottom-left quadrant represented in real world politics. I understood what it *is*, but wondered what political scenario or environment does it mean? The narrative that made sense to me was like the politics of Gandhi, MLK, Mandela, etc, which only sweeps into power in that form in rather exceptional cases, when it's literally throwing off some previous authoritarian regime that was unambiguously exploitative & unjust to certain classes, like literal "2nd-class citizens by law" level of injustice... And even then they don't survive for long in that form just by virtue of the political demands that come up for the next generation of politicians from those parties, now with a foothold in power, cf. the direction Indian, South African, and American black politics have gone since those periods. That was my impression of it anyway.

Edit: For the record, the couple of times I've taken that test, my score was, on the Libertarian/Autoritarian line around -3, and on the Economic Left/Right basically right on the line, sometimes leaning like 0.1 or so.

demagogue on 5/9/2012 at 08:02

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Hmm, 100 years ago the US Socialist/Communist party candidate Debs could receive over a million votes and more than 6% of the electorate in the US, this a few years before the Russian Revolution when communism still meant we want to overthrow liberal government and abolish private property. The last election I see the US communist party running was 1984 when it received 30K votes or 0.04% of the vote (and was very watered down from its former self). I think US politics before 1968 is an increasingly alien land to us now as you go back, even at the level of the basic ideas.

Edit: I mean 100 years ago "left" politics for the North meant pro-immigrant, and through them pro-unions and working conditions, but this was still a time when we're talking about it as a political machine, busing in immigrants to voting booths, not yet the rights concept. Then there was "muckraking", bad working conditions, unsafe food, everything wrong with the "absolute freedom of contract" idea from Lochner. That "left" meant limits to contracts. But still not really yet a "progressive ideology" in the sense we think today I think, labor rights, a regulatory state outside the market, etc... Then if you meant full-on Socialist, that wasn't about civil rights or the regulatory state either, but governance by & for workers. And in the South, neither party had any conception of rights for blacks; the main issue was what to do with poor white labor maybe, or development, but not much recognizably "left" as we think of it today, rights and a regulatory state.

1912 was also famous for the Rep party being split between progressives (TR) & conservatives (Taft), so much that TR started his own party (Bull Moose), got more votes than the Reps, but split the vote and handed the election to the Dems under the quasi-progressive Wilson (who received less votes than Dems had been losing with in previous elections. But he was a former-Bourbon Democrat, very conservative, that went turn-coat to the progressives in 1912 and was still rather rightish as president for some things). We can't really consider the Dems as clearly the "left" Party until after the 1912 "fluke", & still not really set in stone until FDR in the 1930s which is what we think of as "left" now (rights & regulatory state), and even then the conservative Dixiecrats stuck around until the 1970s even.

Remember TR was considered the progressive, what we'd think left in today's terms, and c.f. his 1904 election, the very conservative candidate was the (Bourbon) Democrat Parker. In 1908, Taft was meant to carry TR's progressive mantle in the Reps until he went turn-coat to the conservatives (sort of a mirror image of what Wilson did), which is what brought TR back in 1912 to bring the Reps back to the progressives & split the party. Reps were led by the conservative machine with token figurehead presidents / leaders for the next like 30 years -- really until Ike. By that time it was mainstreamed with the ideas we think of as "right" now.

CCCToad on 5/9/2012 at 16:34

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Nope, I don't believe that the important word is ideology. Instead the US media is defined by a kind of psychopathic sycophancy, where its members are willing to do anything and say anything to please the "right" people. Being invited to the high class cocktail parties, and to tag along on trips, and given exclusive "leaks" by "anonymous government officials" is probably a fairly intoxicating feeling. Play along, and you get to feel like you are part of the rich elite. In many cases now reporters are openly viewing their job not as to report the truth, but to tell the public what the government wants them to hear.

It's part of a larger story.....but this next image isn't trying to make an argument. Its intended to perk curiosity and make you all do your own research:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/8/29/1346258522282/mazzetti.png

Shug on 5/9/2012 at 22:24

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I think it's pretty clear your presence here hasn't led to anybody's entertainment