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Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

A broader definition of blue vs red that generalises to other western counties would be pro globalisation (eg pro immigration, free trade) vs pro national/local focus (eg pro self reliance).

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Isn't globalization and free trade questioned a lot even in the blue tribe today, what with sanctions against russia and china, with self reliance like producing your own chips, being highly priced, worth billions in subsidies?

Globalization and free trade should be completely rejected by left-leaning people. I guess unless imports coming from countries where human rights an economic externality are either taxed to death or banned.

Globalization is indeed unpopular with those who lean left economically. Because it means more opportunity for exploitation of workers, mostly. It's capitalists who like it (which tend to be center to right economically).

Both the GOP and Democrat parties are, in practice, dominated by free-trade liberal interventionist capitalists. The actual policy differences between the parties around those subjects are basically a matter of finetuning.

I don’t think it is possible to come up with a definition of “blue vs red” that generalizes to other countries.

The fact that our left wing movement in the US is so tiny that it somehow got gobbled up into our liberal party makes it very difficult to compare to other countries.

"Vote blue no matter who" attitudes can be thanked for this. People have been scared into never taking a 3rd party seriously. The Republicans are unthinkably bad so it is too risky to split the vote on the left. The only option is the Democrats. Corporations simply migrated their lobbying efforts slightly further over to the left side of Congress during the Obama admin. With strategically placed Senators like Gilibrand for Wall Street and Manchin for the coal/energy industry the corporate oligarchy has pretty good control over things now, the actual political desires of the electorate be damned. Notice how the democrats are politically leading the war/defense efforts now as well, something that used to be a more conservative aim.

People aren't scared into not taking 3rd parties seriously, our system is just fundamentally designed to only have two realistic parties. It's just inherent in a first past the post system.

Yeah, fix the voting system to allow ranked choices and you'll find third parties doing a lot better. Until that voting third parties is sadly irrational until one of the top two parties becomes dominant, at which point switching out the party in second becomes potentially feasible.

The UK uses FPTP and has at least three major parties in Parliament (Lab, Con, SNP) and in the past Lib Dems were big enough to enter into coalition. There are also smaller parties in the Parliament too, like the Greens and sometimes independent candidates.

The reason the US only has two parties is because those parties are sufficiently loose and internally democratic enough that there's no need to start a third party, when you can come in as an outsider and take over one of the existing ones. Parties in the UK exercise much tighter control over who can lead them, and so there's more pressure to set up alternatives. If the US big tent parties worked the same way you'd have more than two parties as well.

I think we could more comfortably vote for a third option if failing to elect the least bad of two did not result in using women as medical equipment and insurrection against the federal government.

Classic sacrifice everything to gain nothing take from a leftist. Third parties can not work in our country with the way elections are designed. You are advocating for wasting your own time

David Goodhart would break it down to "Somewheres” and “Anywheres” The Somewheres attribute a large part of their identities to their place of origin or local communities and are less likely to move. The Anywheres, on the other hand, form an identity based on their life experiences rather than a place of origin; they are a highly mobile population usually congregated in large urban cities like New York, London, or Tokyo. David talks about this in the context of Brexit, but it is a split everywhere

I disagree. You're talking about neoliberal versus xenophobic conservative but even then, mainstream conservative politicians love free markets spoitting cheap labor and illegal immigration.

And then you have a particular left wing contingent that understands the issues with unlimited export of labor to lower income countries, which is why unions and some left-wing politicians opposed NAFTA and the trans-pacific partnership.

Trump might be the only Republican leader in recent history to explicitly desire a crackdown on global supply chains.

> You're talking about neoliberal versus xenophobic conservative

I dont think you are even attempting to be fair towards critics of globalism. This sounds like cheerleading and makes me think you’ve never thought through the dynamics of globalism.

It looks like you didn't read my second paragraph.

My point is that few if any Republicans want to do anything about the labor impacts if globalism, until signing onto chip factory subsidies.

(Well, that and domestic oil production, which contributes to destroying the goddamn planet. But I get the idea that if we're gonna burn it we might as well burn ours. Unless we're playing a long game of exhausting global supplies and sitting on a rarer resource.)

Yes, conservative voters are probably more sympathetic to domestic production, but so are progressives in some instances. Cheap foreign factories and illegal immigration drags down wages and weakens unions.

>Cheap foreign factories and illegal immigration drags down wages and weakens unions

But you can't outlaw foreign competitors from being cheaper than you, any more than you can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow

You can demand domestic companies and importers document and attest to domestic standards of living and welfare (health plans, etc). You can tariff items which are made by slave/subpoverty labor. You can subsidize critical industries.

Or, if the concerns are less about "how bad things are there" and more "what about jobs here", we could be spinning up more government jobs programs, more free college, more welfare here so that it doesn't matter if we lose textiles or manufacturing.

>You can tariff items which are made by slave/subpoverty labor

What are 'normal', middle-class wages in developing countries are 'extremely cheap' by US standards. You can't really solve that problem unless you tariff literally everything.

Subsidizing critical industries- sure, I guess. What's the definition of that? Does it include cars? Clothing and shoes? Appliances? Vacuum cleaners? I don't think anyone's disputing that like military goods need to manufactured domestically, but kind of by definition 95% of goods are not 'critical'

Aren't import tariffs a means to raising prices of foreign competitors?

Sure you can, that's a matter of foreign policy change or, as someone else pointed out, import tax hikes and export bans (on e.g. chip technology, but also up until a few decades ago, encryption technology)

> mainstream conservative politicians

This is more about the voters. But actually neither side of the aisle is completely enamored with immigration.

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