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I think that rather depends on who is elected.
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Dec 14, 2016 00:59
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Still not getting the thesis of the thread. Centrism is the only logical result of a functioning democracy. The democrats don't somehow embody centrism and in-fact it's the bitter partisan rejection of centrist compromise that's characterized the last decade or two of disfunction thats lead us to where we are. The death of centrism is the problem.
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Dec 14, 2016 02:23
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Lemme try explain it under those terms. Arriving at the centre is a result of a functioning democracy (another is that one side wins the public favour and gets to run wild for a bit). Centrism is trying to turn this potential result into an ethos itself. It's fine to say that arriving at the centre is the result of two sides pulling in opposite directions, it's not fine to say that therefore we should try to divine the centre and position ourselves there. A real "centre" would be wherever the different power levels of the different factions places it. On any day it could be wildly left or right of where it was yesterday or the day before (days being figurative here of course) so it makes no sense to try to sit in the shifting centre. Centrism is an empty ideology that tries to be above the fray by ignoring what the struggle is actually about and sitting in the centre because apparently that's what it's all about. A lot of the reason establishment Democrats were caught flat footed in the election is because a lot of them don't have any ideological underpinning beyond the centre, so when the centre shifted underneath them they had nothing to offer. And Nancy Pelosi's comments on how one side gains when the other is in power is her basically saying they just need to wait for the centre to shift back under their feet. No need to actually influence the political environment. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 02:43
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Consistently "arriving" in the center requires a desire to do so. It's not automatically emergent from the rules of the system and requires a culture (and a voting public) that allows or encourages it. The republican unwillingness to accept Obama's supreme court nominee is a perfect example of what it looks like when the governing "centrist" culture deteriorates. It takes more than the consitution and the laws to make the system work.
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Dec 14, 2016 04:19
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Hegelian Dialectics postulates that the thesis and antithesis, when they come together, form synthesis and become stronger as a result. What it doesn't propose is that you should skip that bit and just move into a milquetoast center position right from the get go because conflict and taking a position on anything is scary. The former should be the goal of a functioning democracy, but Centrism is manifestly not that.
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Dec 14, 2016 10:23
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Higsian posted:You'll also note that I only link welfare and the US when I'm talking about the rust belt. A big argument from centrists on this forum was that the rust belt is never going to recover, that the jobs are never coming back, and the rust belt needs to get over the idea of jobs and accept that welfare is their future. You can't bring the jobs back because free trade and even if we changed change policy it wouldn't work because automation so lets just throw welfare at them and go back to pretending they don't exist instead of learning from Trump's win there. I figured addressing points people had made on this forum might be useful in bringing it home for people. The problem is that, once again, your lack of understanding of US politics undermines your point. The argument you describe here is the leftist argument. The centrist solution to the Rust Belt usually amounts to mumbling some vague crap about green jobs and infrastructure spending - it's only the left that are willing to admit that capitalism has fundamentally and permanently failed these areas and that capitalist solutions won't fix them. Higsian posted:Lemme try explain it under those terms. Ideally, what should set the position of the center is not the relative power of legislative factions but rather the relative influence of those positions among voters. The fact that things often don't work this way is due to the fact that we have yet to come up with the perfect representative democracies, and fixing an imperfect representative democracy is really hard even when we know what the problems are. The reason establishment Democrats were caught flat-footed was because Obama's charisma masked serious flaws developing in the Democratic campaign machine, and they failed to properly account for the incredible increase in partisanship and polarization over the last decade and a half.
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Dec 14, 2016 16:32
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Rush Limbo posted:Hegelian Dialectics postulates that the thesis and antithesis, when they come together, form synthesis and become stronger as a result. You don't skip to it but it needs to be recognized as a legitimate and desirable end. The point is that the rules are written to encourage a healthy result but it turns out you can't write rules for everything. Power exists within the system to grind it to a halt and it's only discipline and culture that prevent this from getting used all the time. That's eroding as voters encourage their representatives to put up walls that prevent compromise. This doesn't automatically make the country stronger.
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Dec 14, 2016 17:00
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asdf32 posted:You don't skip to it but it needs to be recognized as a legitimate and desirable end. It demonstrates the weakness of the system and invites correction.
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Dec 14, 2016 17:58
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OwlFancier posted:It demonstrates the weakness of the system and invites correction. Yes but a democratic system must represent what the people want to some extent. If they don't see the legitimacy of centrism as a desireable result the only way you can change the rules to encourage it is to weaken the democracy. And compromise is the only way democracy actually works.
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Dec 14, 2016 20:21
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Rush Limbo posted:Hegelian Dialectics postulates that the thesis and antithesis, when they come together, form synthesis and become stronger as a result. This is prefect by the way.
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Dec 14, 2016 20:28
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem is that, once again, your lack of understanding of US politics undermines your point. The argument you describe here is the leftist argument. The centrist solution to the Rust Belt usually amounts to mumbling some vague crap about green jobs and infrastructure spending - it's only the left that are willing to admit that capitalism has fundamentally and permanently failed these areas and that capitalist solutions won't fix them. It's not a "leftist" argument, it's the argument of a bunch of workshy democratic bougies posing on the internet as radicals because they think that Marx was all about being less down on the French welfare state than Rush Limbaugh and the idea of personal autonomy and material comfort not being things that just happen to you is an entirely abstract, theoretical one that mostly appears in exciting novels. It's 'let them eat cake'. The leftist position orients around democratizing control of the means of material production - whether they're overseas or automated or spontaneously generated by fairy magic - rather than figuring that 'the labor model now is different from in 1867' is a case for handing all power and economic relevance to the capitalist rentiers. Whether you plan to then tax them a small percentage on their ownership of everything to keep everyone else minimally not-starving or not. The window of leftist discourse is on how to grant the people ownership of that which keeps them clothed and fed and empower them to advocate for their own interests from a position of strength, not what rate of patronage we should petition Warren Buffet for as his wholly dependent vassals. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 20:49
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asdf32 posted:Yes but a democratic system must represent what the people want to some extent. If they don't see the legitimacy of centrism as a desireable result the only way you can change the rules to encourage it is to weaken the democracy. And compromise is the only way democracy actually works. I'm not sure who "they" is in this context but it is absolutely possible for people to not like either the center position, or "centralism" as it applies to the positive affirmation that basically liberal capitalism is great and we shouldn't really change much ever. The point of a good government is to serve its people well, democracy is a tool to do that, not the end goal in and of itself. The very existence of the US constitution is based on the notion that democracy does not produce good government of its own accord. And that some limitations and obligations of the government are held to be largely immutable and not subject to democratic modification or revocation through compromise, only by unified support. I don't entirely understand what you're arguing but the idea that the middle ground is a: automatically good, b: the only way democracy can work, and c: unchanging and represented by "centrism" which is not a descriptive but a prescriptive ideology doesn't make sense. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 21:25
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asdf32 posted:Consistently "arriving" in the center requires a desire to do so. It's not automatically emergent from the rules of the system and requires a culture (and a voting public) that allows or encourages it. were democracy actually predicated on everyone in the country without exception clapping their hands and believing in the transformative power of the truth being somewhere in the middle rather than unabashedly pushing to advance their causes by any legal means it'd boggle the imagination any democratic state coulda lasted this long, really. That's kind of an asinine way to run things, and certainly wasn't how people felt back when Congressmen were dueling each other and dishing out beatings on the house floor over causes they actually believed in and disagreed on. it's almost like the democratic system has decayed in the US and what underpins the government now is some handshake agreements and social conventions shared by an insular, legally unfettered ruling class assumed to all pretty much already agree on everything they really value A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 21:31
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:were democracy actually predicated on everyone in the country without exception clapping their hands and believing in the transformative power of the truth being somewhere in the middle rather than unabashedly pushing to advance their causes by any legal means it'd boggle the imagination any democratic state coulda lasted this long, really. That's kind of an asinine way to run things, and certainly wasn't how people felt back when Congressmen were dueling each other and dishing out beatings on the house floor over causes they actually believed in and disagreed on. This isn't just a US problem. Many other Western democracies have similar problems with their governmental structure. For example, Israel's parliamentary democracy trends more right-wing than it really ought to, because no one's willing to let the Arab parties into the governing coalition, forcing the government to be excessively reliant on the far-right parties.
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Dec 14, 2016 22:17
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:were democracy actually predicated on everyone in the country without exception clapping their hands and believing in the transformative power of the truth being somewhere in the middle rather than unabashedly pushing to advance their causes by any legal means it'd boggle the imagination any democratic state coulda lasted this long, really. That's kind of an asinine way to run things, and certainly wasn't how people felt back when Congressmen were dueling each other and dishing out beatings on the house floor over causes they actually believed in and disagreed on. First, it's interesting that your anecdotes date from the run-up to the civil war. Second it's very simple - government by the people requires a population that buys into the idea of compromise and is willing to accept 'centrism' as a result. Broad attacks against the idea of centrism are attacks against democracy. Lastly the ruling class was soundly defeated in this election. Trump is populism and democratic success in a narrow sense.
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Dec 15, 2016 03:54
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The thing is, liberal centrism is not some synthesis born of compromise and debate in western democracies. It's the result of focus-grouping, polling, public relations and marketing. It's about watering down policy to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It nullifies meaningful choice by making all feasible options all but indistinguishable, like having seven different flavours of tea on offer when what you really want is a cup of coffee. It's been dying a slow death for the past decade because once you excise politics from politics people disengage. Just look at how energised and enthusiastic the republican base has been for the past 8 years compared to the dems, it's because the republicans pulled away from the safe center and pursued a radical agenda, tugging the overton window right as they did so. Compromise is great and sure it's a sign of a functional democracy, but if you capitulate and dilute your policies and your values before the debate even starts that's not a compromise that's a copout.
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Dec 15, 2016 05:56
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TomViolence posted:Just look at how energised and enthusiastic the republican base has been for the past 8 years compared to the dems, it's because the republicans pulled away from the safe center and pursued a radical agenda, tugging the overton window right as they did so. the republican base disengaged and started primarying out their leadership because the policies of the Bush Administration hurt just about everyone in the country in a pretty visible and dramatic way, not because they got bored. following the collapse of neoconservatism they have had no coherent policy vision beyond foiling the expansion of big-government liberalism and continuing to throw the bastards out, that motivates people better than McCain/Romney style 'more of the Bush administration hooray' at this point but it's not a 'radical agenda' in the sense that say fascism or dominionism or Cheneyesque schemes to conquer the entire Middle East are. Mentally normal people only care about 'radical agendas' inasmuch as the idea of not using the federal government to hurt people is now considered a radical idea outside the Overton window. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 06:58
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I would suggest that the borderline anarchist dislike of government displayed by portions of the republican base is relatively radical.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:09
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Honestly America's problem is your balls to the walls retarded electoral system at both the executive and legislative branches.
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Dec 16, 2016 04:19
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Bring back the guillotine IMO.
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Dec 16, 2016 06:10
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asdf32 posted:Consistently "arriving" in the center requires a desire to do so. It's not automatically emergent from the rules of the system and requires a culture (and a voting public) that allows or encourages it.
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Dec 16, 2016 09:23
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Arglebargle III posted:Bring back the guillotine IMO.
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Dec 16, 2016 09:31
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Kilroy posted:This is basically what's going to happen, and I am not keen to find out what a Reign of Terror in 21st century America looks like. Nobody's situation is going to improve under the GOP and Trump, and the Democrats aren't prepared to offer an actual alternative. Even if they win in 2018 and 2020, it's going to be off the back of doing a better job of selling Centrism (see: everything Nancy Pelosi has said since the election) and that's just going to piss everyone off again. Democrats are incapable of learning and Republicans are incapable of changing. We're hosed. the Republican party has changed, its leadership has been overthrown by populist radicals who themselves are in prime position to be replaced by populist radicals who actually have some kind of coherent ideology and plan for what to do with power. Who do you think's going to be operating the guillotines, Che-shirted trustfund leftists?
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Dec 16, 2016 15:51
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Part of the issue is that the true center of politics would be social democracy. It is in fact a compromise between socialism and capitalism. "Centrism" as it has been advertised and executed in western countries is quite far to the right of that. "Centrists" have been stomping on unions, outsourcing industries, deregulating the financial sector... and in return what does the left get? DarkCrawler posted:Honestly America's problem is your balls to the walls retarded electoral system at both the executive and legislative branches. This is a problem. The US system is designed to protect rich white landowners and does a marvelous job of that. I think the electoral system is the principle reason the US has never had as extensive a welfare state as other developed countries. Bodyholes fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 18:15
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