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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

The article reads that way until you get half way through it and realize that it’s a few sellouts shilling for dollars. The second half outlines that democrats are the ones who are actually proposing wealth taxes to begin with.

It’s a classic outrage based clickbait article format.

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It's Jacobin, they have a massive agenda and despise "liberals" as they call them. It's a classic case of extremists who think their greatest enemy is the moderate faction of their party, rather than the other party.

It’s frankly a shame we’ve gotten to the point where the other side is an enemy.

Washington and Adams strongly believed parties shouldn’t exist in America because of this. Jefferson manipulated the situation to his advantage and won, enshrining the enshitification of American politics in just the way Washington and Adams feared it would.

I'm too much of a cynic to believe that this was anything, but inevitable. It's not as though countries with many parties or no parties are somehow less divided right now. And frankly when one party led to what we saw on 1/6, and that party is doubling down on that ideology, it's hard to frame them as something other than an enemy. I've never felt that way about the GOP until quite a bit into Trump's presidency, but the feeling has stuck.

At some point we're beyond both civics and civility.

You aren't wrong, but let me offer a nuanced perspective... in the absence of a party, people would congregate together anyway. For example, this is a non-partisan campaign year, and yet the people who have one set of values are all lining up behind certain city council and school board candidates, because their values align. That's the part that I think a lot of apolitical / people who feel disenfranchised from politics miss - at a local / state level, political parties are mostly just your neighbors. They aren't ideological per se, they just care about their community and want to band together with people who they believe share their common views. The existence of political parties is just a natural extension of a desire to "find your people."

In Japan this is what happens, there is effectively a one party rule which contains factions.

Japans politics are terrible though.

Consider this - in Germany, are the Greens and the SPD really that different? In Canada, are the Liberals and New Democrats really all that different? In many countries what happens is that these slightly nuanced parties end up in coalition governments anyway. Which could be a good thing as a party can be formed around a single issue and can strongly advocate in coalition for that issue.

In the US, both dominate parties are actually coalitions that would be separate parties in other countries. It isn't perfect, and these factions sometimes have serious disagreements, but within the Dems we generally believe we are stronger together. The Republican party is going through a serious reckoning between its traditional base and a more extreme wing. It won't surprise me if Democrats go through something similar in about another decade as Gen Z comes of age and wants to push their agenda faster than the traditional moderates within the party.

Liberals are not a moderate part of a socialist faction. They critique the democrats like they critique republicans because neither are in any way compatible with socialism.

I hope that from context it was clear I speaking about the Left/Right divide, not pretending that there's a socialist mainstream in the US.

The DSA has what, 90,000 members?

The mainstream was extremely socialist in the 1930s. I wonder what sort of conditions prefaced that shift...

Some sort of Great Depression? And then I assume the downswing after was catalyzed by the miserable failure of socialism in the context of the USSR, PRC, Cuba, and other countries. Combined with the astonishing associated death tolls, I'm guessing that took the shine off the ideology. Plus it's harder to sell people on one extreme without another extreme like fascism to play off of. IMO that's why extremists are always so focused on moderates; opposing extremists justify and enhance extremism, but the existence of moderates threatens their attempts to frame matters in purely Manichean terms.

Funnily enough, we are once again faced with a choice between rational socialism of the kind that was implemented in the USA in the 1930s, or fascism of the kind that was implemented in various other places in the 1930s.

At that time, America rejected Fascism and chose Socialism, and they prospered for the rest of that century, though by the end the process of dismantling the source of their own success was well along.

You make it sound like we don't already spend trillions each year on a network of social programs, as though that somehow stopped instead of endlessly expanding. You also make it sound like only socialism and fascism exist, as though moderate views aren't even in the mix, despite that being where most people have always been.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58888

We already spend a tremendous amount of our GDP on explicitly socialist programs, I don't see any value in framing that as a thing of the past.

This being ycombinator, before I would attempt to get on the same page with you, I would need to know your income level and how much time you spend walking on sidewalks without bodyguards.

We exist in very different realities; mine is informed by the reality I see around me in the physical world, yours apparently exists in links to economics papers. I suspect that we don't have the same day-to-day experience at all.

As to socialism and fascism... I did not say that only the two exist. I did say that one or the other is coming to America. The idea that this is all going to continue indefinitely, in the USA of all places, is absurd. You people hate aristocracies more than just about anything.

And after the 1940s after defeating Fascism, America entered a cold war with the USSR/Communists. The capitalists prospered the rest of the century and the Communists after looking good in the immediate aftermath of WW2 had stunted growth before eventually collapsing in the 90s

Good point!

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