Ok, I think we’re miscommunicating. Either my question was’t formulated very clearly, or I misunderstood what you said in the first place. I took what you said (“democracy needs capitalism”) to mean “if you want democracy, you need capitalism”, or alternatively “if you don’t have capitalism, you cannot have democracy”. My question is why you believe this (if you do, that is; I may have misunderstood).

Your answer I completely agree with, but it just argues that capitalism is harmful to democracy and that at best democracy is like a guard rail for capitalism. If anything it shows that capitalism and democracy are kind of incompatible.

And it’s a side track, but the Nordic countries are not a good example of democracy counteracting the excesses of capitalism. They’ve just outsourced the worst of the misery to the global South. And domestically the situation for workers gets worse year by year (although they’re a long way from dropping to American levels).

Yes it was! And please look in folks’ comment histories, the tankies were the first ones to call this out.

Could you walk me through why you think democracy necessitates capitalism?

You too!

No, I don’t think it’s nitpicky, and I think it’s relevant to modern day political discourse. It demonstrates that progressive policies and positions are a viable political strategy for the democratic party. I think it’s important to stress this, because a lot of liberals today feel like courting the right is the only way to possibly win an election for the democrats. Stating “always have been” plays into this delusion, and it’s good to remind ourselves that it’s a complete and utter falsehood.

I don’t think this is correct. There was a marked post-Reagan shift to the right. Sure, they were never socialists, but decades ago they at least tried to do something for the working class.

In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.

-Hannah Arendt

I think you don’t fully understand the intention behind the argument. Rather than being part of some mathematical deeply logical proof, it is much more an appeal to someone’s common sense or feelings.

Generally, the conservatives like to portray themselves on trans issues as the common sense side. Think of when they extend LGBTQ with all sorts of weird letters, rolling their eyes. Or think of Dave Chappelle’s punching down specials. Or think of The One Joke. And this is a very successful starting point, because most people are not knowingly interacting with trans people, so to them trans issues are already a bit unfamiliar, or weird.

The idea behind the argument is to have the answerer realize that in fact their position is not the obvious one, and that their position is actually weird. And this is highly subjective. The point is not the answer, the point is the hoops they’ll have to jump through to get to a satisfactory trans-exlusionary answer.

It’s subjective of course, but it’s very hard for someone to write a 20 page definition of gender and then follow that up with “duh”. Or to write something like “producer of the large gametes” or whatever and feel like a normal person.

A geologist buddy of mine works on analyzing soil for placing wind farms.

A lot of people who studied physics do not end up in the “murder children for money” field. You have a choice, and you chose the deeply, deeply immoral path. You’re not fooling anyone, probably not even yourself.

You’re a very entertaining poster

Sorry but here again you’re just wrong on a factual level. China is not capitalist. Read whatever Cowbee writes, they’re usually good at explaining things.

No, sorry, this is incorrect. There are much more efficient and fair modes of production out there. Case in point would be Cuba, or China. The leaps and bounds they’ve made in spite of the largest and most murderous economic power in the world trying to sabotage them every step of the way should be evidence enough of that.

Bro bro no listen we need to capitalism better

But have you considered iphone?

No no no you don’t get it bro, what we have right now is adjective capitalism, that’s very different from real capitalism. Bro if we had real capitalism things would be so nice

There is no alternative ™

For anyone, like me, confused by the title: no verdict has been reached, and the trial expected to last for about seven more weeks.

I think In all honesty that we have different notions of what the word leftist means, and I’m not super keen on a discussion on semantics. Personally, I attach a very specific fixed non-relative set of ideals and principles to the word “leftist” (an acknowledgement that capitalism is neither fair nor efficient, a focus on building a state for the proletariat, cooperation over imperialism, etc etc). From your comment I get the sense that you have a more relativist approach. Whether or not someone is a leftist depends (additionally) on the political context in which they operate. In this light, you call Biden, a staunch neoliberal capitalist, a (lesser) leftist in the same breath as calling Belgian Marxists leftists. I am in no position of telling you that you’re using words wrong any more than you are in the position of telling me I’m using words wrong.

But there are some things you mentioned that I do think are worth discussing, under the assumption that we would both label the mainstream part of the democratic party as liberals. Because they do not support the policies you would label as socially leftist. The last time universal health care was part of a mainstream candidate’s campaign was Obama’s first campaign (17 years ago), and what we ended up with was essentially a handout to insurance companies, a very far cry from UH. No major mainstream candidate since even mentions it.

Then there’s the support for LGBTQ rights. I would like to focus on the T part first. Not only was there no countermessaging from the democrats to Trump’s virulent anti-trans rhetoric; after the race was lost, the MSNBC talking heads and major democrat campaign strategists were on national television claiming that part of the reason Harris lost was that she wasn’t tough enough on trans people. The transgender support by democrats is skin deep, and ready to be dropped when it becomes politically inconvenient. If the transgender folks are that easy to drop, don’t doubt the other letters won’t drop either. To finish off this section I’ll leave you with a nice Biden quote from 2006: “marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that”

Another policy you mention is environmentalism. I won’t be verbose. Big part of Harris’ campaign was that she was more pro-fracking than Trump.

Next women’s rights. Four years of Biden, nothing done to fix Roe v Wade. All these words about supporting women’s rights and here we still are with 12 year olds carrying their rapist’s babies to term. Actually, we don’t even get words, there’s a nice website which kept track of whether the Biden admin used the term ‘abortion’ in a press release (they did, once, more than a year in).

I’m going to take some liberty into what else you might consider socially leftist positions, namely a pro-immigration stance, and an anti-war stance.

War first. You can go back to the Senate and congress voting records. Democrats consistently vote in favor of bombing the middle east. The Biden administration pumped billions into the Palestinian genocide. During the Harris campaign, Waltz said that the expansion of Israel was crucial to the success of America. During the recent Signal gaffe from the Trump administration where a group chat leaked where they were planning to bomb Yemeni schools and hospitals, democrats were outraged not by the fact that the US would be bombing civilians, but rather about the fact that it leaked.

Immigration next. The kids in cages at the border that we were all (rightly) upset about during the Trump admin? Not only did the Biden admin do nothing whatsoever about this, the number actually increased during his presidency. The messaging from the conservatives is simple: the immigrants come in, they’re criminals, they take our jobs, and we need to do something about this. This is of course false, if you look at the actual statistics, undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than citizens, and the addition of immigrants to the workforce (and to the market as consumers) is actually a boon to the economy. Did the Harris campaign do any countermessaging on this, citing the statistics, and looking at reality? No. A big part of her campaign is that her border policies would be tough, and that she was tough on crime.

I’ve taken the US as an example, but the same pattern applies in Europe, at least in the countries I’m most familiar with (Germany and the Netherlands).

Finally, you mention that the extreme right wing is similar to the extreme left wing in Belgium, and that conservatives are left wing on an economic level. I can’t speak much for Belgian politics. I went to the Wikipedia pages of the leftmost and rightmost parties I’m aware of (PvdA and Vlaams Belang) and all I can say is that I don’t see it. I see stark differences on policies on a social level (one being incredibly pro multi-cultural) and on an economic level (one being very pro union and worker, and the other somewhere between neoliberal and protectionist). But again I know very little of Belgian politics.

But I can say something about the conservatives portraying themselves as socialists. Please do not fall for it. This is a trick as old as Hitler. They put the “Socialist” in nazi only to trick workers into voting for them. They ended up privatizing more than any government before them (something I hope we can agree on isn’t very leftist), slashed minimum wage, culled unions, and put socialists in concentration camps. Not very left wing. Same with the current far right in power in the Netherlands. Portrayed (successfully) as economically leftist during the campaign, but every policy they’ve put in place is economically right wing. They tried putting a flat tax (unsuccessfully so), they’ve gutted public services, and they increased income tax while leaving corporate taxes fixed. They do this every time, do not fall for it.

It’s not leftist infighting if one side isn’t leftist.