The Other Left

It seems of late that there are two lefts, and meanwhile many comentariatariates try to cut things left/center/right. I got to thinking about it after following Krugman's link to a Sanders story in the NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/us/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-candi...

Before you get your hairs crossed, Krugman was pointing out the stupidity of attempting to smear Sanders as being too rich to talk about inequality, the article specifically points to the CAP and those kinds of folks.

I of course thought of DK, and it's path of Social Justice as a religion. Many would think that the antipathy voiced towards anything with the "wrong" chromosomes or melatonin of today's SJWs would place them on the extreme left of things politically, and it does, except when it comes to inequality in the economic sense.

I'm increasingly noticing a split and today I read but one more example of someone angry at paying more taxes, someone in the top quintile and probably in the top 10% or more by income. The new taxes do not favor write offs, if one is used to many deductions, you fare worse, and if we are ever to socialize medicine (not afraid to say that word) or frankly many other things, there will be a great leveling, many might have to learn to exist on incomes only two or three times as large as the median. Today they are Democrats, the donor class, the kinds of folks with the time and income to go to rallies and donate a couple thousand. I'm not sure they will be willing to pay the taxes required and the loss of power.

There are unresolved issues from 2016. Trump won, and a lot of Republicans are still pissed and embarrassed about him, but in the end he has done their bidding. There is still a restlessness I feel. An unfulfilled need amongst my neighbors in my precinct. I'm not sure Bernie Sanders can win a deeply divided Democratic Party, and many of the rising stars of the moment seem like so many CAP freindly candidates in a more palatable face.

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Lookout's picture

rather than a dichotomy. That is why I think it is about issues and finding allies which may vary from issue to issue. For example I'll take Ron Paul's anti-war stance but not his domestic policy. We should work with what we have in common rather than fight about our differences. My two cents...

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The Aspie Corner's picture

moderate Republicans/Libertarians with black and gay friends who suck dick for capital and empire. Their job, among other things, is to act as a buffer for the far-right assholes who have been in charge for at least the last 50 years. They can all go fuck themselves with their fake protests and stupid hats.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

Dem Party.

1. Obama won without the PUMAs, and Obama had zero to piddling GOP crossover.
2. Bernie has a lot of Independent support, more than Obama ever had.
3. Bernie has a lot of Republicans with no place else to go. Obama had none.

I have no links to back any of this up. It is a synthesis of what I've read and absorbed over the years. If this was true then, it has to be doubly true now.

The Radical Left’s Agenda Is More Popular Than the Mainstream GOP’s (August 2, 2018)

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Wally's picture

@dkmich

I hate to use VOX as a source but it came up quick in my google search (go figure):

https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2016/7/28/12302406/bernie-or-bu...

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movie buff's picture

Democrats have been elbowing their traditional labor base aside in favor of the "creative class," for the simple reason that they wanted that class's money. It worked spectacularly, and now we are left with the results: America has two parties of the rich, one nativist and reactionary, the other globalist and cosmopolitan.

This left those of us who are unpersuaded by social leftism alone but who would never vote Republican without a home, while the educated, affluent liberals who now make up the Democratic base have nearly free reign within the party. The one concession they have to make to us is that every four years, and with increasing irritation, they have to cancel a brunch or two in order to yell at us dirty socialists that they're entitled to our votes and the other side is worse and besides, we have nowhere else to go. This situation doesn't seem sustainable to me in the long run, but the two-party system has held together, through various permutations and ideological shifts, with remarkable resilience. When even people like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, who seem like they would thrive outside such a confining system, don't dare to step outside it, you know this thing is being held together by some serious centrifugal force.

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"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." --Noam Chomsky

TheOtherMaven's picture

@movie buff

CentriFUGal force would make things fly apart even faster. https://www.livescience.com/52488-centrifugal-centripetal-forces.html

Heh, maybe there's a micro-black hole at the center of the Democratic Party. Biggrin

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven
reason and logic.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

sycophants and media collaborators are center right, not at all left. By defining the center right as the left, one helps eliminate this nation's left or gets to pretend that a moderate New Deal Democrat is an extreme leftist. It's a massive mind fuck designed to keep this country going further and further right.

As for Krugman, he is a dishonest Clinton toady who did a "racially-tinged" hatchet job on Obama and "Obama boys" during Hillary's "racially-tinged" campaign and did the same for "Bernie Bros" in 2016. Given that Bubba opened the door for 2008 economic crashes in several nations without a peep from Krugman, Krugman likely deserved a Nobel prize in economics about as much as Obomber deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

(Which reminds me, why do we use enjoyable physical things to curse people or as pejoratives? "Fuck him." "That really sucks." We be weird.)

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she was on 60 minutes

I never watch network TV but it was tweeted

Nancy Pelosi: "By and large whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know we have to hold the center. We have to go down the mainstream."

60 Minutes: "You have these wings. @AOC and her group on one side..."

Pelosi: "That's like five people."

https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1117569083418075137

Is the establishment doing all it can to hold onto the status quo?

Is CAP attacking Bernie?

It looks like they would like to keep Trump and Republicans and save their bacon rather than address the needs of the country and the earth

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lotlizard's picture

@DonMidwest  
Now in Finland, there’s been yet another election result in Europe with a greater than expected vote against immigration, against EU centralization, and against strong action to address global warming.

https://www.chron.com/news/science/article/The-Latest-Vote-in-Finland-ca...

It’s crunch time for the planet and genuine democracy, but the center-left and center-right aren’t listening to ordinary people. Urban elites with a keenly developed sense of their own moral superiority are continuing to hog the stage and they’re blowing it.

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