Microblog Memes

Americans are so far to the right that minimum wage, affordable housing, free schools and healthcare is considered "far left". These are given and common sense in the rest of the world 🤣

The more... favorable right wing points I've heard are more along the lines of "I've busted my ass for what little I have! How dare you ask me to pay to subsidize the lives of people who aren't trying to work?"

Completly ignoring the fact that better welfare programs should help them to not have to work so damn hard for so little in the first place. Or the fact that the welfare cliff and other various systemic problems make it that much harder to get out of that pit no matter how hard you're trying.

It's not even quite "fuck you, I got mine" because so many of them barely "got theirs" as is, which makes them even more protective. The ones that do have, have latched on to this idea of the entirely self made man, which ignores all the public welfare systems they used on their journey. Like schools, or roads. You can hardly exist in modern America without using multiple tax funded public works/welfare things every day.

Then you add in the hard spun rhetoric that taxes they already don't want being taken from them might be paying for things they personally disagree with and things get extra firey.

Meanwhile the richest people on earth have spent more money than is comprehendable on convincing people that going after rich peoples' money will just make everything more expensive for the normal folk.

But that would imply that they were currently leaving potential profits on the table. They're already charging absolutely as much as they can, and constantly trying to shift it higher. I'm sure they'd still fuck us on the way down, but we're never going to fix things unless we find some way to adequately tax the rich.

Getting everyone's basic needs met is more of a centre-left ideology.
Many centre-right parties believe in things like public healthcare, because it has a net-benefit to the economy.

Centrists don't sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything. That's a really poor strawman argument from someone who clearly doesn't understand global politics.

I guess you're confused with people in the U.S who think having views somewhere in-between those of democrats and republicans makes you a centrist.
That U.S-specific 'centrism' is really just right wing politics.

Meeting everyone's basic needs isn't even far left. This is how far the Overton window has shifted to the right. Meeting everyone's basic needs is left-of-centre. Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.

Centrism doesn't mean that you can't choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can't do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.

What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It's a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn't matter who.

The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can't decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn't automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.

That's not even far on the left, that's just some middle of the ground left. Real far left would be burning government buildings while having a heated discussion about the order of the colors for the flag to be raised over the rubble.

Lol that's not the far left's position get the fuck out of here. The first paragraph is describing center/center-left.

Oh c'mon, I consider myself to be on the left but this is a strawman and you know it

Edit: if you want this to be more accurate then add this at the end of far left section: "at all cost. And I mean ALL cost.". And reminder, we're talking about FAR left here

Americans with their white or black bullshit

Party A... We want to kill 1.000.000 people

Party B ... We want to kill 0 people.

Centrist.... Lets just kill 500.000 people.

Sometimes there IS no centrist position

Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone's basic needs met.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So Democrats are now where Republicans were in the 1980s: friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum.

A more real scenario.

European country bans far right candidate with conections with Russia trying to poison their democracy.

Le centrists: What about muh freedoms!?.

US Government forces Universities campuses to remove degrees of students for protesting (by threatening cutting funds) and threatens foreign students with deportation if they protest.

Edit: Just read the news that an University caved to Trump's demands to be able to get funds. Among the demands is for police to be able to arrest students.

Le centrists: Well they were asking for it...

I used to say that because I though "the left" was Putin and Xi Jinping