I read the news today (oh boy) - Current world events | Page 172 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

In times like this, I always draw comfort from the words of the late, great Tony Benn – “There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle, to be fought over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.” 

For some positive news, Oregon has voted to decriminalize all drugs. This is great because The War On Drugs has been abysmal and despite being nearly identical to prohibition (ie making things significantly worse by pushing it underground), we’ve been ignoring that fact forever.

To make this explicitly clear, i’m not saying that drugs aren’t bad but rather that the government has been failing for decades trying to enforce morality and i’m glad that Oregon has taken the first step in trying to fix that.

I wouldn’t count on Biden winning Georgia just yet. There were a lot of mail-in ballots that were corrected after election day and if Trump can get these disqualified, it’s very likely that it would be enough for him to win the state.

QuarryMan said
If Biden wins Georgia and keeps Arizona and Nevada then he’s won.

Even if he does win, though, this election will have been a monumental failure for the Democrats. They were given a global pandemic with over 230 thousand people dead in the USA alone, a huge economic crash, a summer of complete unrest only fuelled by the actions of government, and one of the most divisive presidents in history. This election should’ve been a landslide, and yet it looks like it’s going to come down to a matter of literally hundreds of votes. It’s almost comical how effective the Democrats were when they had to deny the nomination from Bernie twice, versus how utterly useless they’ve been in resisting the majority of Trump’s agenda and beating him on an open goal of an election.

Definitely, this would be the equivalent of narrowly beating Dick Cheney if he won the Republican nomination in 2008.

Bernie would’ve significantly increased young voter turnout and if it were him, he’d be declared the winner on election night.

I think it’s worth pointing out that Bernie’s actually center-left, with establishment Democrats like Biden being center-right, as he doesn’t believe in the abolition of capitalism like Noam Chomsky but rather wants it to be heavily regulated.

With that being said, @Ron Nasty has a point. While most Democrats would’ve sucked it up and voted for Bernie (assuming Howard Schultz didn’t run as an independent), a good chunk of Biden Republicans would’ve either stayed home or voted for Trump, which likely would’ve likely helped Trump in southern states like Georgia and Florida.

However, Bernie would’ve crushed Trump with high youth voter turnout in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Maine’s 2nd District, and likely would’ve won Iowa and Ohio, which would’ve been more than enough to put him over the edge on election night. But because the Democrats nominated Biden instead of Bernie, many young adults either stayed home or voted 3rd party. Personally, i would’ve voted for Bernie but ended up voting for Jo Jorgensen because Biden has a HORRIBLE record on a variety of issues (most notably, writing the crime bill).

Gotta say, I find the practice of discussing how far left and right each politician is to be one of the most pointless conversations people have in politics. The real political landscape isn’t a simple linear progression from Stalin to Hitler, it’s a complex web of different countries, parties, demographics, policies, electoral systems, donors and so on, and trying to fit it all onto one line, or even a political compass with two axis, will inevitably just confuse things more than it clears them up. I think the concept of an ‘Overton Window’, representing the range of ideas considered acceptable in any given polity at any given time, can be useful, but more so if you look at it as spanning a wide variety of policies and subjects of conversation, rather than just a section of a left-right divide. In my opinion, you can get a much clearer understanding of where Biden stands politically compared to, say, Boris Johnson, by looking at the respective histories of each politician’s country and party.

Healthcare is a perfect example of this. Ever since Clement Attlee’s Labour government introduced the NHS in 1948, the UK has had government-run, universal healthcare, and due to its popularity it is something that the Conservative Party here has accepted as an essential British institution, despite the fact that having nationalised healthcare goes against the free-market leanings of many in the party. Even Thatcher, the most aggressively pro-market PM we’ve ever had, didn’t dare sell off the NHS. The US, on the other hand, has never had an equivalent of the NHS. The closest it has had are programmes like Medicare and reform packages like Obamacare. Biden is a product of the country in which he was born, the donor class who pay for his re-election campaigns, and the political landscape he has spent his career in, and for that reason he has outwardly rejected healthcare proposals similar to the NHS, and instead proposes much more moderate reforms such as extending the ACA and establishing a public option (though I am highly sceptical he will even attempt the latter, particularly given that it looks like the Republicans have kept the Senate and will almost certainly block it). If Biden were to come to the UK and propose Obamacare as an alternative to what we have now, the proposal would be seen as borderline Thatcherite, yet in the US the very seem policy has been berated by Republicans as being communist. 

This is why, even if we accept the simplistic premise of understanding international politics along a left-right axis, it makes little sense to characterise Biden as centre left in UK terms if the Tories are centre-right. I’ve looked through both parties’ policy platforms, and I can’t think of anything that makes one far to the left of another. Even if you take an idea like Biden’s proposed 28% corporate tax rate and compare it to the UK’s 18% (not sure if this is the same post-COVID but you’ll get the point), it seems that Biden is much more left wing than the Conservatives’ own policy, until you consider than Biden is proposing raising it from 21%, the current rate under Trump, and I doubt anyone would argue that Trump is to the left of the Conservatives fiscally. 

TL;DR if I were you guys I would spend less time talking about which politicians are to the left or right of other politicians and more assessing things like which groups are funding them, whose interests they are accountable to, and how they fit in with the historical political and economic context of both their own country and the international community more broadly.