Decline of the Left?
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  Decline of the Left?
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Author Topic: Decline of the Left?  (Read 2698 times)
PSOL
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« Reply #25 on: May 11, 2020, 09:40:02 PM »

The thing is that the culture war matters less, and is a subset of, the war of hierarchy against the current class and caste systems guiding the world. It is ultimately much more harder to crack, even basing itself as a culture war is meaningless. That’s why movements like #metoo or racial justice haven’t penetrated as hard or noticeable the exclusive clubs of global finance, as the elite have immense sway to freeze time in place or revert it, as we’ve seen with the failure of women to penetrate STEM fields due to structural barriers. Then there is the issue of class and caste in America draped and intersecting as a woman’s or marginalized ethnic issue making the problem clear
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dead0man
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« Reply #26 on: May 12, 2020, 11:46:05 AM »

Of course, you're right, but I mean long term. As we've seen in this past decade gay rights have become the norm when in 2008, 2004, and 2012 ballot measures passed in several states banning gay marriage. The acceptance of cannabis use throughout society, so you're right as in they were once accepted as main stream, but slowly the left is winning another issue in the culture war. 
it's good that the progressives FINALLY got on the right side of history with the libertarians on those issues.  Now if only we can get you to understand why it's bad to not let the accused defend themselves at college and how bad occupational licensing is for poor people.

Do try and catch up lefties, it's for the better of everyone.
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Orwell
JacksonHitchcock
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« Reply #27 on: May 12, 2020, 11:54:48 AM »

Of course, you're right, but I mean long term. As we've seen in this past decade gay rights have become the norm when in 2008, 2004, and 2012 ballot measures passed in several states banning gay marriage. The acceptance of cannabis use throughout society, so you're right as in they were once accepted as main stream, but slowly the left is winning another issue in the culture war. 
it's good that the progressives FINALLY got on the right side of history with the libertarians on those issues.  Now if only we can get you to understand why it's bad to not let the accused defend themselves at college and how bad occupational licensing is for poor people.

Do try and catch up lefties, it's for the better of everyone.

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parochial boy
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« Reply #28 on: May 12, 2020, 12:19:37 PM »

It was really kind of predictable that a potentially interesting thread would go in this direction, wasn't it?
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FEMA Camp Administrator
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« Reply #29 on: May 12, 2020, 01:20:17 PM »

It was really kind of predictable that a potentially interesting thread would go in this direction, wasn't it?

I stopped reading the replies to my own thread a while ago. Tongue
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Agonized-Statism
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« Reply #30 on: July 29, 2021, 10:55:14 AM »
« Edited: July 29, 2021, 10:58:55 AM by Anaphoric-Statism »

Tangential direction this thread took aside, I think the answer to the initial question is clearer than posters are making it out to be: 1992 was, according to George Bush in his state of the union address, "the year communism died". The stagnation and collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of China into the world economy is treated as a discrediting of socialism, and triangulating third-way politics have become the "reasonable", "viable" alternative to neoliberalism since that time. Newly isolated socialist countries were forced to adapt as not to starve, all reforming away from the old-style socialism that the USSR supported to systems responding to global capitalist domination- in Vietnam, this manifested as liberalization, in the DPRK, this was hunkering down with juche and songun. The Latin American Pink Tide, which by all means would have been a revolutionary Red Tide if the Soviets were around or if the Chinese were still committed to communism, was largely an electoral democratic socialist phenomenon. The left was further crushed in the authoritarian environment of the 2000s' War on Terror. With the neoliberal "end of history" seemingly discredited by all the disasters of the late 2000s (instability in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession, migrant crises, climate change, etc.), the left made a resurgence via the Occupy movement, European anti-austerity movements, and so on in the early 2010s. The high-water mark was 2016 with the Sanders campaign, IMO, but the same story played out globally: the left faced lingering resistance from declining social democratic parties that accepted third-way politics (including the Democrats, which while they were never on the left, had arguably been dominated by a New Dealer diet social democrat tendency since the Southern segregationists left the party and included leftists in their big tent from the 1930s until Bill Clinton). The split allowed the populist right to prevail.

Tl;dr, it's all because of the fragmentation of the left in response to the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of China. For the left to resurge would take a rejection of neoliberalism that didn't actually pan out like people thought it would.
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Red Velvet
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« Reply #31 on: August 01, 2021, 09:27:53 PM »

Also, Biden is the most progressive major party nominee in US history.

This didn’t age well lol
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dead0man
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« Reply #32 on: August 02, 2021, 10:03:36 AM »

Also, Biden is the most progressive major party nominee in US history.

This didn’t age well lol
it's easier to be a progressive candidate than it is to actually govern that way.  Thank Og!
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Saint Milei
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« Reply #33 on: August 02, 2021, 08:02:18 PM »

S/O to deadoman for correctly pointing out the woke left is catching up to the true right, the libertarian right on social issues. Wow we were ahead of our time with gay issues, civil liberties, drug legalization, criticizing the relationship between government and corporations, and opposing censorship!

Now if we can only stand with rand in 2024-infinity
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PSOL
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« Reply #34 on: August 07, 2021, 07:32:50 PM »
« Edited: August 07, 2021, 07:56:11 PM by PSOL »

S/O to deadoman for correctly pointing out the woke left is catching up to the true right, the libertarian right on social issues. Wow we were ahead of our time with gay issues, civil liberties, drug legalization, criticizing the relationship between government and corporations, and opposing censorship!

Now if we can only stand with rand in 2024-infinity
Well, the ACLU was initially a broad front of Leftists and liberals way back when. Gay rights in the US political scene actually goes back to the Communist-oriented Mattachine society in the 50s and the Left as a whole got socially progressive as we now know it in the 60s with the WWP and Black Panthers. Drug legalization got its start with the Yippies.

The Libertarian Party got there late to the party in the 70s, and it still was very socially backward with battered wife-wannabe Rand and Rothbard’s social conservatism.
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Zinneke
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« Reply #35 on: August 08, 2021, 07:44:02 AM »

The "old" left declining in the West coincides with the industrial working class becoming an irrelevant force and the transfer to a service-orientated society. As a result union membership is on the decline (and the last bastions of social democracy often are those with still high union membership). Organised labour is no longer both a useful tool (due to service sector workers wanting to prioritize flexibility more) not has the same social value it had in the past.

At the same time the US is having a bit of a rebirth in the organised labour movement. But many of it seems more like well intentioned but symbolic posturing than something that can get somewhere. And the US, for social democracy to thrive, IMO needs actually a more top-down approach. It's political institutions are outdated and don't allow social progressive policies to be implemented even if that's what the American people want. So from an outsider I think the American Left should forge an alliance with the centrists that also see the Burkean incentive to reform American institutions

EU is another issue. The main one being the imbalanced currency, the lack of willingness for a transfer union, an inflexible labour market and as I previously said in criticising southern European social democracy, a tendency for cynical politicians to enter Social Democrat parties and treat them as a way to make.money and create a criminal network with wasteful spending and "jobs for the boys" culture. The far anti-capitalist Left had a golden opportunity in 2011 but they consistently shat the bed by associating themselves with China or Venezuela.

There is actually a tradition of labour unions in the EU western countries that can be maintained but it's being undermined by poor political performances as at levels by social democratic parties engaging in either careerism (your average Dijsselbloem) or criminality (your PASOK, your PD, your PSOE).
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