Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

I'm part of the intellectual elite, so are you, to pretend otherwise is just vanity. It would be like pretending I was working class just because I'm poor. In any case, this is my observation of actually going out and talking to people - most people don't care overmuch about politics, especially when there's no election going on.

Academics are workers too though (n.b. in the US the Trump admin wants to reclassify graduate students so they won't be considered primarily employees and therefore won't have enjoyment of collective bargaining protections). I'm not an academic btw, you are; you should have a keener awareness of these things than I.

I agree that most people "don't care overmuch about politics" - didn't I say as much already? There's a difference between being a junkie or activist and having strong opinions, or durable ones. A component of Trump's base, for example, is uneducated white people who were disconnected from politics but nevertheless maintained strong opinions about what the problems with the United States were (immigrants) and what should be done about them ('remove taco') - all before Trump declared and captured their attention. On the other hand there are Sanders supporters who have long believed things like: politics is rigged; corporations have too much power; the government should do something. Just because many of them were not involved in politics or following politics for a long time (if ever) does not mean they didn't care about anything or that they were purely ambivalent.

Even more broadly are millions of people who habitually vote for either major party but really don't think or talk much about politics besides voting at least half the time and arguing with family or coworkers. That's tens of millions of people for whom it would be wrong to translate a lack of engagement with process into an absence of reformist commitment (in any direction).

One should always worry about Lebanon - it's one of the most important political loci in the world. Currently they're having a !quiet revolution" that cuts across sectarian boundaries.

There have been quite a lot of large protest movements flaring up around the world this year. To the point where I searched, "why so many protests 2019" and it looks like other people have noticed the trend.

I'm pretty sure some aren't mentioned in the linked articles that I've also heard of recently. Indonesia for example. It makes me think of this song as aspirational, juvenile as it sounds.

Scientology is actually a religion, sorry to tell you.

Yes. You said centrism is to ideology what agnosticism is to religion. I replaced agnosticism with Scientology. Think about the features of Scientology.

You're just described a mish-mash of Right-Wing policies. Where's the social welfare? The neccesity for charity, both private and public? The provision of necessary regulation on (say) food standards and provision of basic infrastructure (which usually includes healthcare)?

You're just demonstrated you don't know where the centre is outside the US, and that the centre in the US is quite a ways over to the right - not even the Centre-Right in the UK.

Outside the US Obama and Clinton are Right-Wing politicians, Clinton less-so than Obama over all.

We all know that US centrist and neoliberal political patterns have been exported around the world, as seen in the reprioritization of many center-left European parties away from major new programs and regulations and taxation in the past couple generations. You couldn't have your Mitterrands and Meidner Plans in 2000. (To paraphrase certain aggrieved comedians, "you can't do that anymore.") As also seen in the Latin American Pink Wave reacting against American-based ideologies in the first fifteen-ish years of the millennium. The center of received economic wisdom shifted decisively to the right after the 1980s, you know that. It's currently experiencing a reversion, possibly.

Obama wasn't to the right of Clinton though, it's the other way around. I'm not closely familiar with all the tax changes under the two administrations (they're mostly pretty minor and technical), but AFAIK Obama injected more new taxation than Clinton, added more regulation to finance and business, did not cut welfare... and of course for all its limitations the Affordable Care Act was the largest downward transfer of wealth in America since Medicare (because ACA expanded* Medicaid and subsidized health insurance). It says a lot that about the baseline of our politics that this could be the case, but thereby alone Obama has to be ranked to the left of Mr. "Third Way" Clinton.

What I quoted could be interpreted as unknowingly taking the piss out of centrism.

It's a lot less common.

Let's get our variables straight. There's political behavior, most easily but not solely measured in terms of votes cast. There's the characteristics of the parties themselves in a given system, which may or may not be divergent from one another in various ways or at various times (for example. the assimilation of mainstream parties in many countries to the postwar Keynesian consensus for a few cycles). Then there's people's political beliefs, which are about values and priorities and aren't simply subsumed by electoral politics as a practice. A political issue may be "should we refurbish this bridge or tear it down and build a new one?" A political belief might be that the government should do more to maintain infrastructure. A more detailed political belief might be that the central government should provide grants to local governments to help finance local infrastructure projects. When you talk about people's political beliefs I feel like you're trying to simplify by boiling it all down to one point, which you can't really do.

You've just described New Labour - 24 years ago.

The trend continues, it's worth talking about. One factor may be within the correlation between contemporary "young" people (under 40) and the left, where these age cohorts are also the most educated and professionalized. But it's been intensifying for decades in multiple countries, hence: realignment.