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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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How we got here is really easy, we've arrived at the ground state of First Past The Post voting. Once you have two extremists facing off against each other it takes a massive effort to get a non-extremist into office as you can just cruise into an easy victory by running your own extremist against your opponents extremist. Each side effectively has a lock on their own party and it comes down to which extremist will be slightly less off-putting to the independents. In this case the extremist on one side has aspirations to be a dictator, while the other side is so utterly bland he makes milk look spicy. If Biden was any less progressive he'd literally be a Republican.
That's basically what Biden is banking on, that he's so utterly boring and milquetoast that more independents will vote for him over the wannabe dictator of Trump while still getting enough Democrats to hold their nose and vote for him just to deny Trump the win.
You're kind of contradicting yourself. On one hand you are saying two extremists then later about that Biden is right centre.
I agree with the later part. At this moment we have one extremist and one right center guy. The reason Biden is running is to be still appealing to Republicans and independents to dissuade them from voting for trump.
Though, so much effort was put by media to make him look like he is Karl Marx reincarnated.
It is a little bit of a contradiction and I had a hard time following the logic. But your post made me think of something else. If you have one extremist candidate by definition you have two, because from the perspective of the followers of the atypical extremist candidate (a trump like figure) status quo will be an extreme for them
Extremism needs to be judged by the standards of that party in this context. An extreme Democrat is either a radical socialist like Bernie Sanders, or utterly non-progressive like Biden. Likewise extremist for the GOP would be a fascist like Trump, or someone so far left as to almost qualify as a progressive.
I can't help but notice that you couldn't come up with leftist GOP extremist.
I think you were able to do it with Democrats was because Democrats are really everyone else who doesn't identify themselves as Republicans. With the first past the post, those different parties have no option but to work together as one.
I couldn't list the left of the GOP because I don't honestly follow the GOP besides the nearly daily disgust at the things they do. There has to be a far left for the GOP, I'm just not sure who that is (probably because they aren't making the headlines, just quietly doing what they can to hold back the rest of the monsters in their party). Whose the least offensive Republican you can think of? That's probably the far left for them.
Democratic socialism isn’t “radical.”
Biden is extremist by the standards of progressives in that he's basically not progressive. He's not a moderate Democrat, he's far right of the DNC, which puts him ever so slightly to the left of the GOP. The only viable candidate for the DNC given FPTP was either going to be far right or far left, and with the push by their core to make sure Bernie was out of the running far right it was.
Biden is not far right of the DNC, that's an asinine claim. If anything he's towards the left of the DNC. The DNC is just right-center as a whole. (There are obvious exceptions in true progressives that are under the Dem banner because of fptp, but there are like 10 of them or something).
I think the confusion in this case is also a symptom of the problem. On the one hand you have the voters and on the other hand you have the politicians. By the standards of DNC voters, Biden is far right. His platform was basically undo Trump then don't change anything after that. That's not progressive and it's not what DNC voters really wanted, but it was the best option they were given.
On the other hand you have DNC politicians. By their standards Biden might be center of the pack, but only because most of them are clumped up over on the far right. There are very few actual moderate Democrats these days. There are a handful of extremists out on the far left like Bernie, a few moderates in the middle, in then the vast majority over on the far right that a couple decades ago would have been considered Republicans.
Democrat voters haven't really changed, but the politicians have shifted right as Republicans have moved ever further right. That's why Democrat voters are unhappy with Biden, they're looking for a moderate candidate, not as extreme as Bernie, but looking to make actual reforms. That's why they loved Obama, he talked a big game on the campaign trail, and once in office was really good at spinning most of his compromises as wins (just look at Obamacare, literally a Republican healthcare plan that was somehow spun as the socialized healthcare Democrats had been pushing for).
Words have meaning. Far right is literally fascists and Nazis. Are you saying that Biden is a fascist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
You're missing the point, it's a relative scale. You're talking about far right relative to all the parties. I'm talking about relative to just the Democrats or just the Republicans. Think about the current political parties in the US as a pair of just barely overlapping bell curves. The left bell curve is the Democrats and the right bell curve is the Republicans. With each of those there's a central and a far right and far left. Trump is far right for the Republicans, and so far off the chart for Democrats to not even be visible. Biden is far right for Democrats which puts him on the far left for Republicans. Bernie is far left for Democrats, which much line Trump puts him so far off the chart for Republicans that he's not even visible.
FPTP makes the most viable candidates for either party the ones that sit at either end of those bell curves. You either need to be as far away from the other party as possible or so close that you practically qualify for the other party. Landing in the middle of either extreme results in a loss during either the primaries or the general election.
Biden is not closer to the GOP than the DNC. Either you are idolizing the GOP in thinking Biden could represent their platform, or you misunderstand that the DNC is not so far left from Bidens platform. Bernie is literally a different party but ran on the democratic platform for the elections, but the DNC itself identifies with Biden and Clinton politics.
Give me milquetoast extremism or give me death!
I don't really understand your charge against Biden. Skimming headlines from afar it seemed like he was supposedly the most progressive president in a very long time. Where do you think one should read up on his record in office if we want to judge his presidency?
Biden has largely just maintained the status quo. He hasn't done anything to meaningfully progress anything. None of the problems facing the US or the world have been even remotely addressed by him. The best that could be said is he hasn't made most things any worse, although he's really giving it the college try with his support for Israel recently. The only reason Biden looks remotely progressive is because he undid all the stuff Trump fucked up. Just because the previous guy was running backwards doesn't mean you get credit for returning to where you started when you've done fuck all since then.
As for where to find his accomplishments, I've got no idea as he has very few worth mentioning. He's managed to keep the economy going so there's that I guess, and he supported Ukraine, but really that should be considered the bare minimum. Domestically he's doing nothing of particular note.
Climate change is by far the most serious problem facing the US and the IRA is a genuinely substantial step towards addressing that.
Sadly too little too late. Something like that if done a decade or two ago might have worked, but at this point it's a bandaid on a sucking chest wound. Dealing with climate change is going to require not only the kind of investment the IRA authorizes but equivalent foreign policy pushes, as well as a significant domestic PR campaign. The petrochemical companies have been allowed free reign to push their messaging for too many decades and now a significant portion of the US literally believes climate change is a hoax. It's going to take something like the public awareness campaign that was instituted against tobacco companies to undo that damage and the best time to have done that was a decade ago. The second best time is now.
That's an interesting perspective, thanks for sharing.
I disagree with this point enthusiastically. If he steered the boat ten miles up river, that's still a major achievement, especially if the previous captain had just drifted from bank to bank while he was actively putting holes in the hull. We don't know how Biden would have sailed if he'd taken charge where the previous guy did, maybe he'd have stayed in one place, gone down stream, or maybe he'd taken another ten miles the right way, we'll never know.