politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
This has been my position since I was a teenager: centrists are the weak underbelly because they can't pick a side and just want a middle ground.
Great sentiment, but you never have a side, a cause, and your "meaning" is always shifting to placate everyone else in the name of middleness.
To be fair to some of those people, they're not all being unintentionally malicious. I used to call myself a centrist but that was in the transition phase between "conservative because everyone I know is" and "I have formed my own beliefs". For most people that's what the process of developing their opinions looks like. You don't swing right from one extreme to the other. You take baby steps along the way. You start to see the cracks in what people around you are saying but you still mostly hear exaggerated caricatures of what the alternatives are so you're sort of stuck in the middle because you don't know where else it's even possible to go.
Centrists are scum, but the truly disengaged "oh I don't care about politics" people are much worse imo.
Compromise is an important part of government.
I too believe in centrism, so long as the parties are on equal footing and we apply ethics.
If the one side isn’t operating in good faith, and keeps shifting their view more and more extreme, the other side also needs to shift more and more extreme so that the compromise still ends up in the theoretical middle.
Current events are proof that your preconditions needed for compromise to work do not exist in the real world.
That’s because the democrats refuse to move left and don’t have a backbone.
"my centrism isn't a problem, it's DEMOCRATS for not being left enough, because then my centrism would really be centered"
Sure bud, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
You aren't wrong about democrats being spineless, but Personally I could never try and compromise with someone who thinks my very existence and the existence of minorities gives them a reason to hate and persecute up to literal lynching and murder but that's just me.
You missed the part about ethics. The compromise between murdering and not murdering minorities is to not murder minorities.
That is the dictionary definition of ‘not a compromise’.
If they provide anything resembling reasonable, we find middle ground.
The Democrats can't have a backbone. They are owned by oligarch interests. Asking the Democrats to save you is asking a shark to stop another shark from eating you. They are rotten to the core.
If the democrats won’t do it, then a leftist party is required
Exactly. The Democrats are incapable of being the change we need.
To be fair, they kind of did exist for like... at least ~60 years. Many of us are old enough to remember what life in the 90s was like.
I would say the last time they existed was the 1970s when Nixon agreed to create an EPA he really didn't want to that had fewer powers than its supporters really wanted. The 90s only seemed smooth because scumbag Clinton gave Republicans everything they wanted on welfare reform, criminal justice, telecom deregulation, intellectual property laws, and international trade.
And we still got Gingrich and the contract with America and Ken Starr and Sore Loserman for being so conciliatory
It's never been perfect, and far from ideal, but it worked. Compare that to whatever the fuck it is we're experiencing now, and it looks like a goddamn utopia.
And erased the deficit. Plus the first real attempt at national healthcare.
I mean, there's good and bad. We could have that or we could have all bad.
Until some of you start running and finding out what it means to win an election we default to whoever they've got queued up.
Dude, no. The 90s were better than now because the ball was closer to the top of the hill and hadn't been rolling back down as long. The strong worker protections, economic regulations, and tax policy that built the middle class during the 50s and 60s started to be dismantled in the 70s because of compromising with economic extremists. They started blaming everything that made a strong middle class possible for high inflation and have been doing it for every economic woe since.
On the other end, the only reason many of those laws were able to be passed in the first place is because FDR and company dragged us there over the objections of the same group.
The best times this country has had economically were never because the neoliberals and their predecessors back through the robber barons were less extreme and more reasonable, but because we had politicians who were up to the task of kicking the shit out of them and overcoming their influence.
Replace "the real world" with "America" and you're right. There is plenty of real world out here where there is no need to be tied to one party. In my parliamentary elections I've had 3 parties that I'll choose from depending on what they've been doing recently. It all comes back to that stopid FPTP system forcing two parties on you.
A parliamentary system may be more resilient against fascist takeovers but this discussion is about the inherent foolishness of the centrist fallacy.
It’s a fallacy under any circumstances: do not compromise with people who are operating in bad faith.
I mean, what is the compromise here exactly? Don’t deport all the children with cancer? Only shut down half of the department of education?
Did you not read the ethics part? The ethical compromise between fuck over DoE and not fuck over DoE is not fuck over DoE. Democrats should be moving left
Sorry, I misread your comment.