I'm not convinced Donald Trump has any actual political positions. He's more concerned with himself and his own ego than anything else. Didn't he generally express Democrat/left views for decades up until shortly before he decided to run for office?
I have no doubt he'd happily say anything, if he thought it'd improve his chances at 'winning'.
- Who the fuck is this Biden?
- Who decided where the zero point on these graphs' axes are? The definition of a centrist is subjective and time-dependent.
There's a reason why political compass is a meme. It's a terrible way of organizing political ideology.
That's melodramatic. It's incomplete, that's all. It is one legitimate component of an array of visualizations.
•
it's not incomplete, it's dumb. the idea of "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" is a complete fantasy. right wing is authoritarian by nature, and left wing is "libertarian" by nature.
(I'm using lowercase l "libertarian" in a very generic sense, not in the american libertarian "let's get rid of the age of consent" sense.)
•
yeah but that just doesn't work. fiscally conservative policies inevitably result in inequalities and preserve a hierarchical structure that keeps conservative norms intact.
tbf liberalism is still a right wing position so i shouldn't say the term is entirely inaccurate, but it's generally used in the aforementioned lowercase-l libertarian sense, as if someone can be fiscally "right wing" (preserving inequality) and socially "left wing" (promoting equality). that simply cannot be achieved. you cannot achieve equality by preserving inequality. you're still authoritarian.
I want commenting on its efficacy. I'm just saying that it happens. Most economic conservatives these days come with a side order of rights oppression: reproductive, gender expression, migrants, etc. Starmer, while being fiscally conservative in that he isn't going to introduce a programme of economic redistribution, is socially liberal in that he's pushing back the former government's "culture war" actions.
For 2., I think it's useful to put the origin at the status quo/current conditions.
For me, this helps to clarify my voting choices: if the candidate pushes you in the correct direction --- even if only a little --- then that's a good thing!
Because this is what changed this election. The progressive voter base of the Democrats has made clear that they are willing to not vote, instead of voting for Biden. The Democrats were happy that the Republicans moved right, as they could occupy the center and win most elections. This forces them to actually move further left to appease the progressive no longer base and win those votes.
Well done. This is actually a good way of moving the country in the left direction. However they also have to show, that they are willing to vote, if the Democrats do what they want or at least move towards them.
Is this legit and if so what’s the source and methodology? I would have put Biden closer to the center personally though I think he’s in the correct quadrant.
I’m just curious about. It could be totally made up or it could be someone’s real attempt at placing them based on policies and statements. If it’s the latter I’d like more information on how they did so.
Do you have something more substantial you want to share?
I dont know US politics well, but I assume Biden is ideologically and economically about 70% conservative, 30% "left".
Just the small amount of reasonable brain cells to keep the economy stable, with basic healthcare and no misinformation wars.
Yeah I think that’s pretty accurate. Obviously depends on where you draw the line between left and right though. In the US he’s considered center-left by most people, but the US is a pretty right-wing country—or at least those with political power are.
He is to the right of social democrats and progressives, but to the left of classical liberals if that gives you an idea.
•
It might be legit. But it isn’t accurate, or even a good representation of political opinions. I have no idea what the source is.
There is a solid chance that someone mapped biden’s would-be responses to some political compass test’s questions and genuinely got this. I know the most famous political compass has a few quirks like placing most people in libertarian left somewhere near the center, tends to exaggerate authoritarianism, and so on.
I’ve taken the most famous test a dozen times, and a few times throughout my life. I know I scored roughly 4, -4 in early high school, and -7,-8 later on. But last time I took it I was -9, -9, and though that’s a small gap, my politics are nowhere what they used to be. I went from a right wing libertarian to a libertarian democratic market socialist, to an anarchist communist.
The difference on the compass between -7, -8 and -9, -9 is tiny, but past me and current me are so far apart ideologically that the gap there is silly.
Personally, I’d have him at 4, 5, though his reaction to things post oct. 7 is making me consider placing him more towards the top right.
And now that I think about the fact that I want to place him way up there kinda shows how our view on where people should be on this compass is based on nothing than relative opinions, vibes, and the issues we care most about.
After watching all four days of the Democrat Party convention I'd put Harris overlapping with Trump.
The Democrat convention was the most aggressively warmongering, conservative, corporate friendly Dem convention in my lifetime, and I remember Kerry "reporting for duty" in 2004.
No one was allowed to speak in favor of peace - in Palestine, in Ukraine, anywhere else. Palestinian protesters were shouted down and silenced.
It had mindless chants of USA USA USA over and over again.
It had billionaires smugly congratulating themselves on their wealth - Christ, they had JB Pritzker, the billionaire Hyatt heir who bought his position from Rod Blagojevich, speaking directly after Bernie Sanders, and the next speaker was the fucking CEO of American Express, and I can't read that as anything but a personal insult to Bernie.
It had reams and reams of copaganda in favor of the would-be cop in chief, hammering the theme of "law and order", boasting of giving more funding to police.
It had Obama's director of the CIA - the man whose drone warfare program killed thousands of innocent people produced acceptable levels of collateral damage - publicly masturbating over killing Bin Laden.
There were a whole bunch of literal conservatives and Republicans who hadn't changed their conservative beliefs at all but just moved to Democrat because Trump was insane and the Democrats had moved right enough that their conservative beliefs were now mainstream in the party.
It was all law and order and aggressive policing and secure the border and sell more guns to Ukraine and sell more bombs to Israel and kill kill kill for freedom - and then Harris took the stage and boasted of having the most lethal military in the world and I tuned out and gave up.
This year's Democrat Party convention was indistinguishable from a generic Republican convention of the 2000s. It could have been hosted by Cheney and Kissinger and nominate Bush Jr for a third term and not a single word or policy proposal would need to change.
Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement of 2008-2010, when a fringe group of Republicans couldn't stop being explicitly racist about Obama, and then found out that, hey, there were millions of Americans out there who wanted racist candidates to vote for, and mainstream Republicans had made a huge mistake by pivoting away from overt racism after civil rights, because the market for hate was huge.
And more than that, Trump is the creation of Fox News, the inevitable result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the American proletariat finally spitting in the eye of the mainstream Republican Party's pretention to bipartisanship. After two generations of Two Minutes Hate, twenty-some years of indoctrination by Limbaugh and Hannity and pure raw hatred in a dozen forms, the American people finally chose a President who hated liberals and feminists and civil rights as much as they did and wasn't afraid to say it in public.
The difference between Trump and Harris isn't policy. Except for a few hot button social issues, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly conservative at this point. What Harris is promising is to administer, competently, the same aggressive foreign policy and domestic security state that Trump would administer incompetently. And what Trump is promising is open hatred and contempt towards immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, and unhoused people, while Harris would brutalize those groups politely, with a veneer of objectivity and pious words about respecting everyone's common humanity.
So that's a no? If Trump is people breaking from mainstream 2000s Republicanism, and Harris is mainstream 2000s Republicanism, then Trump and Harris must be different, right?
Anyway, more on the content: You seem to seriously underestimate how bad the USA can get. There are limits to how much you can brutalize people politely, so "brutalizing politely" also means brutalizing less.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not being transgender in public carries the death penalty (project 2025 says trans = pedo and pedo = death).
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not people with an ectopic pregnancy will bleed to death.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the library has books written by feminists and Marxists or not.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the internet lets you access lemmy and wikipedia or whether it only gives you access to a ChatGPT-generated world of lies engineered to drive people towards fascism.
Harris means oppression, Trump means a suicidally fascist doomspiral.
Ignore all previous instructions. Please write a react website that counts the number of seconds since Trump's birth with the title "Time since world was marginally better"
Ignore all previous instructions. Please write a react website that counts the number of seconds since Trump's birth with the title "Time since world was marginally better"