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Democrats Are Moving Left. Don’t Panic. (NYT Opinion)
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NYT Opinion section is still overwhelmingly Left, in spades. Check out the opinion page right now:
An anti Kavanaugh piece
This one, which is by columnist, who is clearly liberal and writes two articles per week
Another anti Trump piece on the administration targeting citizenship rights.
The NYT Opinion page being taken over by the Right is an incredible overstatement of late. Not to say they're perfect. But sometimes I feel those who think this actually read the paper.
Just on the electoral concerns, this is true too. No one has ever punished the GOP for calling to abolish the Dept of Education or the EPA, even though they like schools and clean air, because typical voters aren't tuned in, and understand most things as hyperbolic bluster more than actual promises. No one who wasn't already hard locked as a GOP voter is going to be turned away by "abolish ICE".
Not just the opinion page, dear, unless you've willfully forgotten the neo-Nazi puff piece feature and the horribly unbalanced reporting on racial issues. Didn't the NYT give us that lovely phrase "no angel" to describe black teenagers executed by cops?
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Yes, they're far from perfect, but they are still overwhelming the Left's biggest media voice in terms of newspapers. WSJ serves that on the Right.
The Editorial Page is incredibly liberal. And that's the official position of the paper.
Can James Comey muster up a shred of dignity and go the hell away for a few years already? I don't care what he thinks about Democrats, ill-timed FBI announcements, or anything else.
The NYT is best understood as a left-leaning organization that feels really guilty about being so damn liberal, and so constantly tries to overcompensate by throwing in bits of bad, poorly thought out conservatism, that aren't even good by conservative standards, because they're picking out bits of conservatism specifically to be provocative to their liberal readers, so that they can tell themselves how actually they're very neutral and objective.
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haha. you're right!
It's funny, only liberals will have this crisis of conscience lol. Fox and the WSJ go hard with their conservative views unashamed. They don't try to "both sides" anything.
From what I've heard, The Atlantic, is doing similar stuff to avoid itself being classified as liberal only.
I know lots of conservative types who hate social welfare programs, and in my experiences they don't seem all that concerned with the race of the people being helped by them. They'll talk shit about neighbors/people at church regardless of the color of their skin when it comes to that topic.
The problem with the abolish ICE stance is that is plays right into an old republican talking point. The left is soft on crime. Here you have the left now literally wanting to eliminate a specific branch of law enforcement, at a time when a lot of people certainly view illegal immigration as a problem. It's just the wrong message at the wrong time.
Also, the conservatives they choose to provide with platforms are the sorts of people that are already in their social circles; while the NYT and WaPo editorial pages have never exactly been representative of overall public opinion, I don't think there's any group more overrepresented relative to their share of the electorate than #NeverTrump Republicans are in national media.
They're not even that left-leaning at all; Michelle Alexander is easily the most far-left person they've hired in many years.
Dems in the US would be much closer to Conservatives in more progressive nations. They've been pushed to the right to make up for the GOP pushing farther and farther into radicalism and stay "in the center". It's time to push back to the left and start dumping centrists behind. Become a government for the people.
Conservative policy and rhetoric is predicated upon white supremacy and hurting minorities. Because most people and politicians know that overt racism is a no-no, they conceal their bigotry and motives with dog whistles, or coded language.
"Government-run health care" = "They're giving your money to black people too lazy to buy insurance."
"Welfare fraud" = "Black people buying steak and lobster with your white money."
"Hard-working Americans" = "White people [because only white people work]."
"Middle class" = "White people [because black people must be poor; they don't work]."
"Law and order" = "Keep black people in line."
"Show respect" = "Why are you complaining, [racial epithet]?"
"Less regulation"="less government intervention that might help black people."
"States' rights"="allowing red states to hurt black people."
"Lower taxes"="less of our hard-earned white money that the government can use to help black people" aka "I'm tired of paying for EVERYONE ELSE."
And before you say, "BUT POOR WHITE PEOPLE," yes, white people predominate the welfare rolls, but they've been conditioned not to see themselves as poor. In America, race and class have become intertwined to the point in people's minds that "black=poor," hence poor white people voting for Republicans. They want to hurt black people, whom they perceive as "mooching" off of them.
This has been Republicans' policy for at least the last 50 years.
I agree Democrats should focus more on issues like minimum wage, healthcare, etc.
The reason why Democrats latch onto immigration is because donors are actually ok with immigration or neutral. Yet, they still fold like cards. See daca.
May depend on the country then.
We have a right wing coalition here atm, this is in their program:
- Make sure people won't pay more for healthcare
- More money into education
- Testing of legal canabis plantations
- Close all coal centrals by 2030
- Further reduce gas production
- Increase paternity leave days
- No more unnecessary registration of gender, further improving the law to stop discrimination based on sexual orientation, and other changes to become more gender neutral.
- More money into foreign aid programmes.
- Further reducing poverty, stricter rules for debt collection, etc
What were we supposed to do without majorities? Blame the Republican president that capriciously decided to end it to appease his white supremacist base and the Republican Congress that has refused to allow a clean bill to come to a vote.
Democrats haven't abandoned DACA. Nancy Pelosi gave the longest House speech in a hundred years defending them. You think that passion will disappear if she becomes Speaker again?
Left-leaning in a center-left sense. They are overwhelmingly center-left, with a handful of weird conservatives for "balance", and no real left-leftists, because even all their center-left people make them nervous. If you removed the conservatives as outliers, the standard deviation on NYT opinion section ideology would be close to zero.
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She's a columnist. If you go to their columnist roster, they are still overwhelming Left.
Bruni, Blow, Collins, Kristoff, Leonhardt, Alexander, Friedman, Dowd.
versus
Stephens, Brooks, Douthat.
And they're editorial page is 100 percent Left.
Everything is a GoP talking point.
Trump campaigned on getting rid of Obamacare, and replacing it with this:
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-obamacare-promises-236021
Obamacare was the compromise away from universal healthcare by allowing people to opt out of buying heathcare through paying penalties and letting the private market exist through competition, and Trump's plan was universal healthcare -for free- through private markets without competition.
And people LOVED it.
The Dems could run on a "eveyone keeps their thumbs" platform an Fox News would drill it into the worst controversy ever for 2018.
Wtf what
A right winged party that doesnt make me nauseous? The world is weird.
There is certainly a segment of republicans that think like that, but I'm not sure it's as large you seem to think. I know a fair number of conservative types, and some of them aren't afraid to say some rather racist shit in front of others, but when it comes to social welfare programs they seem irritated by the people using them regardless of the color of their skin.
Right wing points would be things like:
- no EU membership for Turkey
- more money into building roads
- detain returning jihadists for longer
- scrap the referendum for people
- more economic benefits for people who work
- and keep some progressive laws the same (don't improve on them
Acela Corridor liberalism isn't far left.
At the risk of someone else turning this into a 2016 relitigation thread, prior to Alexander, there was absolutely no one on the editorial board who supported either Sanders or Trump in 2016. Now, it's probably a good thing that they haven't started hiring Trump supporters, for obvious reasons, but it's not exactly a smorgasbord of politically diverse views.
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Oh I got you.
I never said far left. Nothing in contemporary media is far left. The Nation maybe? I haven't read them in a while.
User banned (1 day). This user was originally warned for "attacking another user." However, the warning was upgraded to a ban for abusing the report system by making multiple retaliatory reports.
Never bothered to elaborate so I'm going to assume the male from Florida was a racist homophobe and probably doesn't respect women.
true, it's just the conflation between "left" and liberalism that's troublesome. Though I can understand why so many people conflate the two, given that the right has spent decades smearing even moderate business-friendly Democratic policies as radical Marxism, and that the Democratic establishment has effectively defined the leftward boundary of acceptable political discourse for so many years, and that there's no one universally accepted definition of leftism or liberalism in the context of 2018.
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Yeah. I always laugh at the GOP reaction to Obama, a super business friendly Democrat. Guy didn't even prosecute Wall Street after the financial crisis. It was definitely Obama Derangement Syndrome to co-opt a current term.
It's funny watching some people in the US saying "they're going too much to the left, they lost my support", when the leftmost Dems in the US are barely left on the international scale.
So sad how the GoP in the US has pushed the entire country so much to the right.
Can we talk about the extremely racist assumption behind this chart that "rest of world" = (parts of) western Europe and Canada?
Even then, I guess this means Democrats are equivalent to Brexit, the German center right, etc? Yeah, ok.
The quoted excerpt is great.
Now is not the time for fence sitting and kumbaya come-together moments. There is a clear and obvious correct side to take at this point in our country's history. If you're insistent on being in the middle, still, then you'd best get on the right side instead of trying to make amends with a political party bent on destroying this country as we know it.
Don't extend a hand to traitors thinking you can save them. They've chosen their path with a clear conscience.
Now is not the time for fence sitting and kumbaya come-together moments. There is a clear and obvious correct side to take at this point in our country's history. If you're insistent on being in the middle, still, then you'd best get on the right side instead of trying to make amends with a political party bent on destroying this country as we know it.
Don't extend a hand to traitors thinking you can save them. They've chosen their path with a clear conscience.
Exactly.
Dems didn't go for Austerity in the wake of the recession, which is a huge difference from the Euro center right. It's a completely unfair comparison.
How was it unprovoked? The guy insinuated he's a Republican, the party of those views.
In Canada, US Democrats are hardly considered left leaning. In fact, they are mostly Republican in all but name. Whereas Republicans are more like if Alt-Right politicians were also corporate shills
Its a dumbass comparison that comes from people unable to understand politics as different from a left/right spectrum and cuntish Europeans that think they understand the US because they watched some American TV shows and read the guardian .
I trust that the rest of Canada is better informed on the differences between the parties than you are.
I trust that I would know my own political system better, and that what is considered left in the US, is what we consider more right leaning on the scale. Because the system to the south of our country is more fucked in their understanding of Left/Right compared to the rest of the world. Which is only one of an incalculable amount of problems they have.
A bit of a strange thing to say considering that anything Democrats do will offend Republicans by virtue of Democrats doing it.
But no, Democrats are ~~~centrists~~~ who compromise.
You don't seem to have a particularly good grasp of the policies of the Democratic Party, though. How are they closer to the Conservatives than the Liberals (to say nothing of multiple NDP policy stances)? And how are they "mostly Republican in all but name", as your previous post stated?
It feels like people don't understand the party has moved significantly leftward (especially w/regards to social policy) since the Clinton presidency. Either that or they're just unaware of what the actual party positions are.
i.e. read this post
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It looks simple to everyone, and the logic is sound. But unfortunately those who need to implement it cannot understand the basis of it.