Hacker News Reader

Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

How could you argue we have gone "hard left" exactly?

What is an event or piece of legislation that has been passed?

Socially and culturally it's undeniable, it's now completely unacceptable in my professional and social circles to publicly support one of our two political parties.

Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects, but it has been at levels typically only those further on the left would propose.

Since when is it just one party’s bag to spend loads of money? I’m not sure that the stopgap measures in the CARES Act qualify as “hard left” considering they were intended to provide aid to the country during a hudred-year catastrophe event. Distinct from the media monkey-dancing, both parties obliged those initial packages with little cross-party fuss. It seems as if you’re conflating “left” with “spending lots of tax-payer money.” That ship has sailed. I still have my first paper stimulus check with a very proud signature on it. This kind of my-favorite-flavor of picking and choosing what is “left” and what is “right” proves the intentional vagueness of American politics works perfectly in undoing any meaningful criticisms of the system as a whole. Both parties are one in the same. The differences between them are immaterial in the face of the problems we face. Red or blue, they will continue to burp their champagne at us as this magnificent shift drifts further toward the iceberg and they tell us from both sides of the aisle “we’re working on it, but the other guys won’t budge.” How many decades does this pattern play out with nothing getting better before the realization sets in that nothing is going to get better, and that’s the way it’s meant to be? No left or right, only wrong.

Which political party was in charge of the executive branch and presided over the unbridled and unprecedented government spending since the beginning of the pandemic?

Well, one of the parties has kind of gone off the rails with support for literal assaults on our democracy. You bet it's unacceptable.

I agree, it's the party who thinks our entire system is racist because it was built by the euro-centric male slave owning patriarchy. Thinking it needs to be torn down and made into a NWO by way of packing the supreme court, flooding in illegal immigrants to vote, letting riots happen, and pushing CRT and gender theory on elementary students is definitely an attack on democracy.

Forgive me if I'm not really that concerned about Qanon shaman taking selfies in the capital building or the FBI creating fake white supremacist groups.

How much TV do you watch?

How many people were killed Jan. 6th? How many citizens were under threat?

I know of one, but there aren't any statues of her going up anytime soon.

Yep that's my point. The only person hurt Jan. 6th was one of the "insurgents". So, why is mainstream media pushing this narrative so hard?

Politically, we're deadlocked as always.

Don’t think this is true empirically. Unless “always” means “sometime in the 2010s” vs the entire data set.

One small anecdote to avoid citing :), a biography of a US congressman said that in the 1950s Democratic and Republican Senators would sometimes vacation together at each other’s summer homes or during the annual recess. Not sure that happens anymore.

Some would say that spending $6 trillion in < 2 years on largely progressive programs is a pretty hard left swing. Others say that since the latest $4 trillion hasn’t passed yet we’re not left enough.

Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.

Yeah, that might have something to do with a major global pandemic, the response to which we completely bothched in our country.

Let's see, who was the party in charge then, hmm...

I mean why are we counting 2 years when the "left-leaning" party wasn't even in power 1 year ago?

Even those on the right were, at least temporarily, willing to accept unprecedented levels of government spending.

The right has not been truly fiscally conservative for decades. Maybe you are the anomalous one, as your party seems to have transitioned to cults of personality lacking any sort of coherent ideology.

Please show receipts here. You mean the infrastructure bill? That is only 1 trillion?

What do you think is going to happen if we stop maintaining our infrastructure?

It will survive for another decade or so, but without funding for maintenance and repair, at the point where it gets actually too unsafe to use or collapses during regular use it will be either a Democrat president getting under fire from Republicans for "not doing enough about infrastructure" or a Republican president blaming past Democrats for being "unwilling to fund infrastructure" - and the latter would actually be correct this time, given how Manchin acted.

The problem with the infrastructure bill is that the price tag was hidden with programs that needed to be renewed periodically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com