(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Just saw someone complaining that Hillary Clinton is "too liberal". And that drives me crazy because, uh, Americans? Hillary Clinton is *not liberal, in any way, at all*. Hillary Clinton is a hard-right extremist, of the sort that would be considered either "the far right of the rightmost Major Party" or "unelectably far right, relegated to an insignificant joke party" EVERYWHERE IN THE CIVILISED WORLD. Fucking hell, Bernie Sanders is center-right when you look at actual positions and not just "where you are relative to the bigoted extremists".

Clinton could MAYBE get elected in Canada or England, but she's significantly to the right of Theresa May or Stephen Harper or Boris Johnson - she might be an MP, elected by a yokel constituency of a few thousand xenophobic hicks in the middle of nowhere, like Nigel Farage or Jason Kenney, but she'd never be Prime Minister.

The USA is a captured two-party system with a hard-right extreme-conservative corporatist party - the Democrats - and also a second ultra-bigoted theocratic party, of the sort that polls 1-2% in civilised places, the Republicans. There's no such thing as an American politician who's "too liberal" because there's no such thing as a liberal American politician, all liberals are excluded before the process starts. Anyone who says an American politician is "too liberal" just means "insufficiently extremist right-wing for my personal ultra-extremist bigotry"

At the same time, the person ignorantly calling Clinton "too liberal" was doing so in the context of "She's too liberal but Trump is a disaster, so I will vote for the liberal evil" and, uh, okay. Sure. Whatever. Clinton's a right-wing extremist who will be significantly worse than any liberal candidate would be, but you're correct, Trump would be WAY worse. So you do you and hold your nose and vote Clinton, even though she's "too liberal" by being an ultra-right-wing lunatic who is not liberal in any way.

Comments

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Preach!

[thornae.livejournal.com]

Did you mean actually mean Elizabeth May, or rather the human rights nightmare that is Theresa May? Because I'd say Clinton isn't that far to the right of the latter.
But otherwise, yes. And France is likely to give Le Pen a good chance at getting elected when Hollande's time is up.


... where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I meant Theresa May, yes. And Clinton is fairly far to the right of her.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Yup! One must step away from the sponsored bilge spewed at our eyeballs and into our hear-holes long enough to appreciate your words. But that causes distress, so few do.

[peterchayward.livejournal.com]

"Some people have complained that today is 'too hot'. And that drives me crazy because, uh, people? Today is *not hot, in any way, at all*. Today is maybe 35 degrees celsius, a temperature which would be considered "the coldest point ever" or "insanely cold to the point of impossibility" ANYWHERE ON THE SUN. Fucking hell, even the middle of the desert is "really absurdly cold" when you look at actual temperatures and not just "how hot it is compared the rest of this one planet you HAPPEN to live on."

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, because it's not like words have meanings, "Liberal" and "conservative" don't have definitions and certainly don't describe anything, they're just mouth-noises.

[peterchayward.livejournal.com]

And context never, ever matters.

[skington.livejournal.com]

I think there's two parts to this.

Socially, Hillary Clinton is as liberal as any mainstream left-wing party - the UK Labour Party, French Socialists and US Democrats all shifted in favour of gay marriage at pretty much the same time, for instance. (I don't know other countries' political parties well enough to make comparisons.) And the people who vote Democratic - ethnic minorities, what's left of the working class who still feel tribally leftwing, people with degrees - are basically the same people who vote for the Labour Party and the French Socialists.

Economically, at least when it comes to levels of taxation and/or government involvement in the economy, I'd say the Democrats are more rightwing than most leftwing parties, but not by much - maybe at the level of a centrist party in Western Europe.

Where US politics looks batshit insane is where saying something as mundane as "hey, why don't we have government-funded healthcare" or "do we really need everyone to have a handgun?" places you on the extreme left of the political spectrum. But I think this is a matter of path dependency: if you were going to build a country from scratch you wouldn't have a long history of excessive gun ownership, or ridiculous stuff like for-profit hospitals. But given that you have all of that, *and* the right-wing opinions on the other side that go with it, the left-wing party can't afford to have positions too far removed from the opposition party - especially when half of the country says they're conservatives, roughly 30% say they're liberals, and the rest say they're moderates.

[m-m-y.livejournal.com]

It is just nonsense to say that Hillary Clinton is "as liberal as any mainstream left-wing party". Cast your eyes to the north, Gay marriage became legal in Canada in 2005. Over a decade ago.

There isn't a mainstream party of any wing whatsoever in Canada that does not support a single payer health care system and generous maternity leave.

Gays have been able to serve openly in the Canadian military since 1992.

Hillary is to the right of many of the members of Canada's mainstream right-wing party.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

It's her ties to the corporate oligarchy that trouble me. Don't know how the American public is going to snatch back our government after the latest disastrous SCOTUS rulings on unlimited money in politics. The GOP has been doing a great job destroying public education for decades now. There's a GOOD reason so many Americans are apathetic.