Jaicee said:
Well hey, I'm glad you're inspired to get into politics! To be clear, I am a democratic socialist, by which I mean specifically that personally my preference would be for a broad reorganization of the economy such that the means of production would become public property, workers would manage their workplaces day-to-day, and the economy would be democratically planned out routinely by the population as a whole in a participatory fashion. I believe this would require a general devolution of political power to more local levels. There are a number of communities around the world that currently live in this sort of communalist fashion and they're my source of inspiration in this area. Nobody in the U.S. Congress or running for president advocates this type of broad restructuring or even close. All the progressive elected officials at the national level are reformists, whatever they claim about themselves. That said, I'm a pragmatist and as such am inclined to support those reforms which move society in the general direction of the type of change that I believe in. In the area of economic policy in particular, AOC advocates many ideas that I strongly agree with and support, and I would commend her for leading the House Democrats to formally, at least on paper, embrace the Green New Deal. In a general sense, I consider the economic policy ideas of the progressive Democrats their strong suit. That's the main reason I view them more favorably than other political factions that exist in the U.S. at this time. That includes AOC. However, there are other policy areas where I don't agree as much with the progressive movement, and in which it could be said I agree less with AOC than with the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Foreign policy is definitely one of those areas. I'm in favor of a moderate approach. When it comes to policy toward Israel, for example, I'm for cutting off military aid for painfully obvious reasons, but I don't go so far necessarily as to support imposing broad sanctions on what frankly is really the only halfway functioning liberal democracy in the Middle East because "Benjamins". When it comes to stuff like this, I think you can see how my own views are more similar to those of Warren and Sanders than to those of AOC and "the squad". I think it's also worth pointing out that, though I do consider myself to be a democratic socialist, a feminist, an environmentalist, pro-immigrant, an opponent of mass incarceration, this sort of thing, I don't actually consider myself to be a progressive these days. That's because I've found that progressives don't view me as one of them. The specific term "progressive" appears to have a very specific connotation in the current parlance. For example, I'm not allowed on the Revolutionary Left forums because I have voiced openness to deep green politics, not just bright green; deep green apparently being considered reactionary. From this I gather that the term "progressive" in the contemporary parlance specifically includes not just the general goal of improved equity in economics, politics, and cultural life, but also insistence upon technological advancement. I find I'm not allowed in other progressive spaces either for this and other reasons ranging from my opinions about women's right to private spaces and freedom of speech to my negative view of religion. Over the decade, I've found that voicing any kind of support for radical feminist groups like Femen and well frankly any of current South Korean feminism has been a particularly sure-fire way to get removed from progressive spaces quickly. I've thought about embracing the term "moderate" because a lot of politically marginal people do so, but it just doesn't sound accurate to me. I need a label that sums up my overall worldview on all the issues and I can't think of one that's accurate. For further clarity on my level of support for the people we're talking about here, I would say that I agree with... ...Elizabeth Warren about 80% of the time... |
This kind of stuff right here is why I don't really believe in the political left-right spectrum. It's useful to a degree, sure, but not everyone fits into it. That said, I feel like deep green doesn't make you reactionary, if anything, them kicking you out for it makes them reactionary. I haven't seen that dynamic in the environmentalist space, though. Of course, I don't have any places online that I hang out with an environmentalist bent, so it's not like I have a good sense of these things. I have some deep green leanings myself. I feel like at some point we're going to run into the physical limits of our environment pretty hard. I'd say that point is maybe a couple decades from now at best if we don't change how our society works. Unlimited growth is impossible. I'm not sure I'm against "industrialism" per se so much as I am against economic systems, like ours, that assume infinite growth as a prerequisite for any possibility of functioning. I think technology has a lot of potential to mitigate the damage and prevent a lot of loss of life both human and non-human from our ecological overshoot, but am under no delusion that it'll somehow make infinite growth possible. I just know that population will probably level off soon as women's rights, education, and affordable birth control make their way across the world, and hope that we can squeeze that already oversized population into a small enough portion of the earth that it can continue to support us all. That will require a new economic system, but that sounds great to me honestly. You sound like you're against technological advancement, but I see nothing inherently wrong with it, so long as it advances in the right directions. Indeed, I see it as essential to preventing a mass extinction event at this point, or at the very least to prevent a die-off of humans on the order of several billions.
