Nuvendil said:
I just might. I have developed quite a lot of political ideas recently. Being relatively detached from this primary as a moderate conservative, it's mainly been a lot of food for thought. The basic TL;DR is that his tax plan, approach to student debt, regulatory ideas, and sheer breadth of government spending and involvement in some industries would actually be pretty severely out of bounds in the Sweden people admired in the 2000s to 2010s. I think I will do the posts actually, but it's going to be a lot of data :P I just hope when I do, we can have a dialogue. I think there's a LOT that we need to fix, but I think the "revolution or status quo" dichotomy I'm seeing build up is obscuringmany potential options. |
Let's talk political theory for a bit. First of all, communism has never been implemented in any country. Communism is the ultimate goal of many Socialist countries and that;s why they call themselves communists. Communism is like a utopia version of society for the people. Russia, Cuba, China, etc fall into those communist socialists.
But what Bernie Sanders is and what the Nordic countries and Europe are is very different. Firstly, socialistic policies are not failures if there is less corruption evolved and they are built up smartly. Germany basically has free college, universal healthcare and their law requires boards of companies to have 49% worker representation. That's hardcore socialist right there. The social democracies of Europe are also a more socialist than the US but maybe the farthest they go is something like Germany. The belief that any of that is bad is not shared by many people. So the premise that you think it's bad is not agreed by me, at least.
A democratic socialist is even more to the left of social democrats. That's what I believe Bernie Sanders is but not what's he's run as. His platform is like a social democrat but his beliefs I think are more left than that. He knows though that Americans are not there yet. And he did not lose because his policies were not popular. They were the centre of the primary and the most popular policies in the race. He lost because of the imaginary manufactured consent of electibility. The mindless pursuit of beating Trump no matter who else comes is what beat Bernie this time( he can still win) and last time, we all know Clinton screwed him over. There was a lot of corruption going on last time.
Finally, the US is no stranger to socialism. Socialism is in the US today and a form of socialism saved the US back in the day. The new deal was very socialist in nature and I believe whenever the greed of chrony capitalism gets too much for the country to hear, socialistic policies have saved the country. Pure capitalism leads of oligarchy and plutocracy. The US is very close to those things. It needs socialism to save democracy again. Contrary to the belief Americans are force fed about Socialism and dictatorships, it's very effective in maintaining democracy if done right.
Some Socialist policies in the US are roads, public schools, public libraries, police, army, emergency services, subsidies for the rich, bailouts for the rich, funding research through public funds, etc. And as a famous American Socialist once said: There is Socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. Yes that guy was a socialist, go read his work. If the message Bernie gave was through the lens of MLK and FDR, I believe he would've done a much better job of claiming the electibility argument for himself as well. It was not a perfect campaign by any means. But the general are easier for Bernie to win rather than the democratic primary. I believed that before this thing started and I know it now.
A mix of socialism and capitalism is the best system the world has come up with. No need to free or hate a system. That's illogical and stupid. Learn from every political theory, the good and bad and figure out the best mixture of different theories to come up with something better.
Just a guy who doesn't want to be bored. Also
