WilliamWDelaney wrote:
We could use any leftist party at all. The Democrats are center-right, and the Republicans are far-right. We don't have a political left in this country except for a lonely little fringe out there.
Agreed. It's frustrating for me as someone whose politics lean toward the left that the words "liberal" and "progressive" are branded as obsecenities in the United States today. Without progressivism, women and minorities would never have gained suffrage, laborers would still be working in needlessly unsafe conditions lacking things as basic as emergency exits, and we wouldn't have any of the national parks or the infrastructure built under FDR's public works programs. The United States could have been in a much different place today if we'd taken a real interest in progressive renewal years ago-- building a new green infrastructure to supplant our energy dependencies, and investing in innovation to build whole new industries as we once did. Instead, we decided-- as usual, in recent years-- to go down the so-called "conservative" path, one that got us mired in unwinnable wars, squandered our surplus, and peeled back regulations to let the rich fleece the poor and middle-class.
One of the reasons I left the States was because there was really
no one speaking for me. Let ruveyn and Inuyasha and anyone else who thinks the Democrats are actually "leftist" be up in arms about the suggestion. I don't care. The Democrats are cowards and capitulators, but even when they
do actually put up a fight, what they're fighting for is usually not that progressive anyway. What the U.S. needs now is a true, united, progressive voice to counterbalance this shift to the right-- one that has a spine, and isn't afraid to stand up to the Republicans and demand they make some sacrifices for the good of the country. We've tried it their way for far too long, and this obsession with status quo has gotten us exactly what
any obsession with status quo yields: stagnation and decay. That is why progressivism is important. It's natural selection at work-- either you adapt and grow, or you perish.
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Mediocrity is a petty vice; aspiring to it is a grievous sin.