The Commonwealth of Crowns

Communism destroyed the Soviet Union and the Eastern European allies. China too started prospering only after it opened its enemy and allowed globalization and private enterprise. China is no longer Communist, it's a one party totalitarian state.
And now, Communism has come to roost in the west in the ugly form of Antifa, CNN and the democratic party of USA.
It will destroy the West and all the values it stands for , in cahoots with Jihadism.

BORDURIAA wrote:

Communism destroyed the Soviet Union and the Eastern European allies. China too started prospering only after it opened its enemy and allowed globalization and private enterprise. China is no longer Communist, it's a one party totalitarian state.
And now, Communism has come to roost in the west in the ugly form of Antifa, CNN and the democratic party of USA.
It will destroy the West and all the values it stands for , in cahoots with Jihadism.

Do not despair. I am sure the destruction of the West is communism's aim, but I also believe that the US will regain its immunity in time, which naturally diminishes with successive generations who lack the presence of a clear threat. What really concerns me is whether the US, and the free world more generally, will come to their senses before something decisively prevents such a course correction. Case in point, COVID has provided a marvelous pretext for several of the most brazen and orchestrated power grabs I've seen in my life, and I think the most critical of these are related to information dissemination and regulation. It is this area where many of our chief internal divisions are sown and exploited, and it is important that people understand that censorship will not fix this problem.

Regarding China, indeed ever since the reign of Deng Xiaoping, the PRC has exhibited many properties that appear to me to be increasingly fascist, most relevantly in terms of its economy, which is highly dirigist. Nevertheless, they've never given up their socialist/communist ideology, and these days, Chairman Xi's aim appears to be to return to the purest form of totalitarian socialism (colloquially "communism") since Mao's reign. I was for a time a proponent of engagement in the hope of their gradual reform, but not a policy of engagement so utterly negligent as the one that has prevailed over the last 30 years. Now, my hopes for such an outcome have greatly diminished, and I no longer see this as a viable strategy. Nevertheless, many of our "elite" are good and captured, and so actively work against the interest of their fellow countrymen, some knowingly and others unwittingly. This is perhaps the defining problem. The solution then would be to make them see the probable costs of entanglement with the PRC as greater than the probable benefits.

Helladria wrote:

I've been hearing this claim for 20 years. I've yet to hear it be made convincingly.

For starters, left and right are very poorly defined descriptions. When I hear "far right" and "far left", both tend to be used to describe highly authoritarian ideologies, often with revolutionary aims if out of power, or a willingness to use state authority to (potentially violently) suppress opposition when in power.

Somehow, I suspect that what you are primarily considering is economics, which is also misleading in this regard, since "far-left" would generally be associated with state ownership of the means of production, while the opposite of this would be laissez faire capitalist. However, politically "far-right" regimes tend not to be very laissez faire, and instead tend to adopt moderately to strongly left leaning economic policies.

So in order to understand your meaning, what I would be interested in knowing is in what way you consider the Democrats "right-wing" and in what way you consider the Republicans "far-right".

I agree with this. Perhaps the tilt towards Nationalism or socialism defines the right or the left, rather than the economy.

Helladria wrote:

I've been hearing this claim for 20 years. I've yet to hear it be made convincingly.

For starters, left and right are very poorly defined descriptions. When I hear "far right" and "far left", both tend to be used to describe highly authoritarian ideologies, often with revolutionary aims if out of power, or a willingness to use state authority to (potentially violently) suppress opposition when in power.

Somehow, I suspect that what you are primarily considering is economics, which is also misleading in this regard, since "far-left" would generally be associated with state ownership of the means of production, while the opposite of this would be laissez faire capitalist. However, politically "far-right" regimes tend not to be very laissez faire, and instead tend to adopt moderately to strongly left leaning economic policies.

So in order to understand your meaning, what I would be interested in knowing is in what way you consider the Democrats "right-wing" and in what way you consider the Republicans "far-right".

I must admit that I, too, have been accepting this claim for years without so much as a second thought. Apparently it has been repeated so often that it has become some sort of truth to many so now I'm not sure if there is any truth in it. I tried to find some comparison to e.g. Dutch political parties but another version of the political compass seems to be used in the Netherlands ('conservative/progressive' instead of 'libertarian/authoritarian') so I'm not sure if they match, but using the information on the pages mentioned below, democratic presidential candidates of the USA seem to be in the top right corner, leaning to the middle (with Trump in the top right corner, leaning to to top right corner, so more authoritarian right); the UK's conservative party seems to be matching Trump, while the difference with Labour is enormous, which is in the bottom left corner. Dutch and Belgian progressive political parties tend to be in the top left corner and Dutch and Belgian conservative parties in the bottom right. But I probably need more than these two websites to check this.

https://qz.com/1748903/how-2020-us-democratic-candidates-compare-to-global-politicians/

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politiek_spectrum#Meerdimensionale_benaderingen ('links' = 'left'; 'rechts' = 'right', data from the Dutch national resp. Belgian federal elections in 2012 resp. 2010)

New poll time! there only can be one!!

page=poll/p=166318

Favorite pot pie!