Liberal Socialism – with Matt McManus
Does a moderate version of socialism pretty much believe the same thing as liberalism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgefM1AipFs
Tag: moderate
Is Tim Walz a progressive or a centrist — or both?
“Overall, defining Walz in terms of the party’s ideological camps is surprisingly difficult, which makes him interestingly reminiscent of Joe Biden.
Often during his long career, Biden was a mainstream Democrat. But he’s also long harbored anti-elite inclinations, being skeptical of Wall Street and the economic policy establishment. He also rejected the foreign policy establishment’s consensus on Afghanistan, advocating against a troop surge during the Obama administration and ordering full withdrawal once he was president himself.
And once in office with a narrow Democratic majority, like Walz, Biden wanted to go big with an FDR-sized agenda. (Walz had no pesky Senate filibuster rule or recalcitrant Joe Manchin to spoil things.) In office, Biden has mostly tried to keep his coalition happy, but when the politics looked dire on immigration this year, he did try to pivot to the center with new asylum restrictions.
So while Walz may be a new face, his political style and instincts may represent a good deal of continuity with the current president.”
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/366201/tim-walz-record-governor-progressive-agenda
How I went from left to center-left
“The most important issues here, to me, are the related topics of China and climate change. I used to think the engagement with China strategy made sense, and I thought the people who objected to it were mostly driven by economic ignorance about the benefits of free trade. I still think the economic arguments for free trade are sound, but the actual geopolitical situation has evolved to the point where it’s clear that commercial ties between the United States and China were not fostering world peace or the liberalization of Chinese society.
Unfortunately, a lot of what’s happened since the conventional wisdom shifted on China is just unprincipled protectionism.
I think that’s wrong. Reducing dependence on imported Chinese manufactured goods is like trying to make sure we have the capacity to produce more ammunition — it’s not an economic policy at all, it’s a national security policy that involves incurring economic costs. We should be freeing up trade with the rest of the world, especially with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Which is just to say that the China situation has made me more supportive of ideas I would have rejected in the past, like increasing the defense budget, while continuing to feel that the new post-neoliberal ideas, on both the left and the right, are basically wrong.
But this really comes crashing into the mainstream progressive view of climate policy. Since the mid-Bush years, American carbon dioxide emissions have fallen nearly 20 percent, while global emissions have risen by over 20 percent.
Just to clarify that I am not a knuckle-dragging moron, the following standard environmentalist points are all true:
On a per capita basis, American emissions are still exceptionally high.
On a historical basis, America is still the major contributor to climate pollution.
The countries poised to suffer most from climate change are not the ones that have benefitted most from industrialization.
Those three considerations do add up, in my opinion, to a compelling moral case for American climate leadership. That said, the cold hard fact that I’ve come around to is that while it would be worth it for the United States of America to bear significant economic costs to avert climate change, it is literally not possible for us to do that. Given that the United States needs tax revenue, we can and should price the externality associated with our domestic carbon dioxide consumption. And we should fund clean energy innovation, continue to drive down the cost of batteries and solar panels, and make complementary regulatory changes to try to speed the deployment of long-range transmission lines, along with geothermal, small modular reactors, and fusion power. But China is doing a lot of that innovation and deployment right now and also building tons of coal plants, and we have no way of stopping them.
Instead of wrestling with these realities, American environmentalists are too often shopping ideas like denying poor countries financing for their own industrialization or trying to stop the United States from supplying the world with natural gas. These ideas almost certainly won’t work as environmental policy, because countries that want natural gas will just get the gas and the financing from other less friendly countries. And if they did work, the outcomes wouldn’t be desirable — trying to reduce emissions by choking off economic development in poor countries inverts the moral logic of the whole argument.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-i-went-from-left-to-center-left
What we’re getting wrong about 2024’s “moderate” voters
“A final chunk of Americans are a rare breed in America’s political parties. They don’t fit neatly on the ideological spectrum; on the partisan spectrum, they tend to lie outside the political parties. Some academics, like Fowler and his team, call them “idiosyncratic” moderates, but I think “weird” is simpler since it describes just how difficult they are to read.
Unlike disengaged moderates, weird moderates are engaged — aware of political news, policies, and debates — but like disengaged moderates, they hold a mix of opinions. They aren’t really drawing those positions from the ideological extremes, so they tend toward moderation on a variety of issues. Because of the weird mix of ideas they have, they might not feel represented by either party or by a specific conservative or liberal ideology. They also include your classic “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” types who might have been more predominant in the Democratic and Republican parties of less polarized times. They’re not consistently liberal or conservative on all topics and therefore are open to persuasion. They hold the opinions they do have strongly, unlike the true moderate, but feel overlapping pressures when making a decision in the voting booth.”
…
“The imperative to persuade true and weird moderates runs counter to the trend of America’s political parties, which have been moving further to the political left and right while also becoming more ideologically consistent internally — pushing out moderates of all kinds. Party leaders have been leading this push, but the rank and file has followed suit in the last two decades, as rates of self-identified moderates have been on the decline in both parties.”
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/24058352/what-were-getting-wrong-about-2024s-moderate-voters