[logn]

From your link, I think the author nailed it. The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extreme. The reality is that tomorrow's left will have opinions like the NYT writer. You can see the inverse of this on the right, too: Rand Paul has surpassed Sarah Palin; Alex Jones surpassed Glenn Beck.

Edit to add: So the progression of political trends isn't linear. Liberals push for the next new idea and conservatives want to hang on to (or revive) some other value, but (hopefully) neither is going to endlessly push their agenda today until it's some authoritarian mockery of itself.

[morgante]

Yup! That idea gives me hope that we are not in an inexorable decline of intellectual thought. Fashions, including intellectual ones, are both faster to appear and slower lived than actual ideological shifts.

I think it's telling that while political and ideological fashions fall in and out of favor, actual policies tend to progress towards effectiveness.

[lnanek2]

What makes you think polices get more effective? The F-35 is a laughing stock. Surely most effective wouldn't be an overbudget, past deadline, aircraft with a host of problems. Surely most effective would mean avoiding things like that with government purchases.

Taxes get more complicated every year. I have a whole extra set of documents and fines to deal with because no health insurance is punished now, for example. Surely more effective would be least overhead to do taxes possible and least burden on the poor people without insurance.

The goal of many politicians is to increase pork barrel spending in their state, so it isn't like they are even trying to be effective for many policies, just to try to wrest the most money and support from the others. So if you mean most effective at making deals with businesses, maybe you are correct.

[Gifford]

The point of ACA was to make not being insured more hassle than being insured, to motivate you get insurance, not complain about the hassle of being uninsured. Maybe you philosophically oppose insurance, but it isn't ineffective at its stated goal

[Alex3917]

> The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extreme.

I see a lot of evidence on the right but not much on the left. E.g. The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. But I don't really see any evidence that, say, what the folks lobbying for high speed trains really want is to put Christians to death or whatever.

[fennecfoxen]

> The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality.

I'm curious what this alleged political process actually looks like -- are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? -- and the extent to which "people saying they support gays [etc]" here in America actually are participate in that sort of process. When I hear those words, I think of some of the people behind SB 296 in Utah, the antidiscrimination legislation which has received praise from both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Also, way to go easy on the left. "High speed trains" is the worst you could do? Ha! You could at least apply the "help African governments" standard and start digging through their support of various leftist / Marxist regimes for convenient atrocities, I'm sure there's something :P

[Alex3917]

> are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finan...

> Also, way to go easy on the left.

I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception.

Whereas when people on the left have historically supported genocidal regimes, as far as I can tell it's been because they (perhaps naively) did so unknowingly rather than because supporting genocide was their intended outcome.

[twoodfin]

Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception.

I think you've been reading too much Daily Kos if you think it's an exceptional right-winger who doesn't want to genocide minorities.

[Alex3917]

> I think you've been reading too much Daily Kos if you think it's an exceptional right-winger who doesn't want to genocide minorities.

I mean you could just watch Fox news or whatever and see what they say they want in their own words. It's largely not social liberals who are supporting the war on drugs, war in the middle east, privatized healthcare/water/education, climate change denial, etc.

[fennecfoxen]

According to this piece:

(a) Miscellaneous fundamentalist elements of the Christian right who clearly don't support gays have been doing miscellaneous agitation through their missionary arms; African churches have been lobbied (in the passive voice) "to drop ties with mainstream Christian groups." I'm not sure who these shadowy figures are, but it sounds like they're not mainstream.

(b) Everyone is helping support the death penalty for gay people because the Obama administration gave the Museveni regime cash and military aid.

This situation seems problematic. However, notably absent is commentary about people who "say they support gays but are against gay marriage" lending any form of material support through their actions. Is it possible you have conflated several of your political enemies? It's an easy mistake to make, we pretty much all do it from time to time...

[Alex3917]

> I'm not sure who these shadowy figures are, but it sounds like they're not mainstream.

My understanding is that they are actually quite mainstream:

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

E.g. they include several prominent senators and congressman. I'll admit that I don't know for a fact that the exact same people have said they support gay people, but I still think my comment is valid because that's basically the right-wing party line and these are folks at the very top of the Republican party.

Again I'm not saying that if the left had a monopoly on politics that they wouldn't do a terrible job, only that I think they have less of a propensity to say they want X when really what they want is Y.

E.g. when they say they want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% because that's what climatologists say is necessary to prevent runaway climate change, I don't get the feeling that what they really want is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100%.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception.

I don't think comparing crazy blog commentators is a fair standard for either side. I'm going to come up with something I think is a bit more fair: compare the intellectual component of each side.

* Left intellectuals (ie: writers at the Guardian, Jacobin, etc.): tendency towards hero-villain thinking in domestic policy/class struggle, a tendency to apologize for violent regimes that purported to be engaged in class struggle. Occasional cultural silliness, and fairly commonly prone to apologia for anything a perceived "underdog" does whatsoever. Otherwise, generally quite cogent and able to come up with extensive critiques of the status quo and platforms of action.

* Right intellectuals (ie: the National Interest, The Economist): tendency towards hero-villain thinking in foreign policy, leading to support for violent regimes purporting to "keep the damn dirty Leftists out". Large amounts of cultural silliness, especially prone to believing that hierarchies of authority just are morality, especially prone to tribalism and a bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones. Often cogent, but not actually consistent in platforms and critiques: usually more focused on rationalizing the existence and actions of some power-hierarchy to which the intellectual is loyal than with establishing any universal moral principle at all (other than hierarchy itself).

It's pretty damn clear which side I'm on, but I also can't think of any facts I've neglected at the moment. Worldwide, the separation between Left and Right seems to really be about principles versus hierarchy.

[ghufran_syed]

The economist recently had several articles supporting the right of sex workers to work legally and openly, and is supportive of gay marriage: when you say they have a 'bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones' , are you suggesting they are against those things or supportive of them?

[eli_gottlieb]

The Economist is a bit of a weirdo: a genuine liberal-capitalist publication. They're the odd ones out, these days.

[jqm]

"praise from both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.."

Who, in my opinion, are simply trying to recover from the political damage cause by the California prop 8 fiasco.

[eli_gottlieb]

Also, if the Left always gets more left-wing over time, while the mainstream always moves leftward, leaving nobody but a lone batch of online hyper-reactionaries defending decency and normality, where's my Communism? Worker-owned cooperatives? Commons trusts? Basic income? Only the last of those is even under the remotest mainstream consideration!

And how is it that we've got the most hegemonically capitalist system the world has ever seen, with self-professed right-wing nationalists or cultural conservatives running most of the planet's governments, and I hear that what we really need to worry about is college students being dirty hippies? After all, college students have always been dirty hippies, and the world has yet to die of it -- unlike, say, global warming.

Tempest in a teapot </crotchety>!

[guscost]

The World: 8000 BC - 2014 AD. Died of Global Warming.

But seriously, I don't agree with the choice to label our recent history a "leftward" movement. I would call it a gradual, and thus far successful evolution. It often includes progressive ideas spreading through society, but as the author correctly points out, many progressive ideas are never accepted (see eugenics).

I think the best way to explain it is to say that while the "conservative" side of our culture tends to favor stagnation, the "liberal" side of our culture tends to favor unchecked growth. On the one hand, it would be very unfortunate if our society stagnated for centuries like some have, but on the other hand unchecked growth is what cancer does, and that's not healthy either.

[kedean]

The problem is that these particular college students are too far left, its that the ones who are being extremely leftist are also trying to silence everyone else and remove the intellectual environments from universities. It's not about which side their on, it's about the end result they're trying to achieve. Leftist college students in the past weren't trying to silence and terminate professors for expressing a viewpoint contrary to theirs, unless there was some kind of legitimate attack with it.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Leftist college students in the past weren't trying to silence and terminate professors for expressing a viewpoint contrary to theirs

As a matter of fact, in the '60s and '70s they were trying to blow things up, burn things, and kill people.

[kedean]

That's terrorism, and thats dealt with by law enforcement. This is a group trying to manipulate the existing system to their whim, and that's a more insidious problem to deal with.