Biden for PREZ?!?!?!

[rogue06]

He caucuses with them, though. It's not like they were strangers.

Back in the 90s Bill Clinton backed him over his Democrat opponent because he understood Sanders would vote in complete lockstep with the Democrats 100% of the time, whereas a regular Democrat can not be trusted to be that loyal

[Mountain Man]

His own party stabbed him in the back in the last election. Why would they want him now? Why would he trust them?

Because he's not to bright? Because he believes they only did it for the good of the party? Because he thinks with Hillary out of the way he has a real chance this time?

[Sparko]

.
I believe if you called Biden that to his face he would slap you silly.

On the political spectrum of Starlight's he is!

To him Stalin was probably a centrist.

[Zymologist]

I knew Uncle Joe was just bidin' his time.

[Terraceth]

His own party stabbed him in the back in the last election. Why would they want him now? Why would he trust them?

In regards to why he would want to, it's because running as an Independent is a near-guarantee you won't be elected, whereas running as a Democrat actually gives you a plausible opportunity. There's also question of vote splitting... Sanders is probably not that fond of many of the Democrats, but I expect he'd rather see a Democrat get elected than Trump have 4 more years.

[Starlight]

On the political spectrum of Starlight's he is!

Biden's squarely within the 'centrist establishment' wing of the democratic party, and in terms of major 2020 democratic presidential contenders he'll be the fartherest to the right.

To him Stalin was probably a centrist.

Stalin was a dictator. Dictatorship is a right-wing thing as opposed to democracy which is a left-wing thing (this was pretty much the original definition of the terms in France where they were invented - consolidated people in the hands of the few versus distributed power in the hands of the people).

Stalin himself wasn't all that interested in Marxist theories and one of the first things he did was persecute the Marxists in his party, exiling and killing Trotsky who wanted to pursue actual Marxist policies. Stalin found it a convenient propaganda tool to pretend his regime was "socialist" as it lent some credibility to his reign. The US also found it convenient propaganda to pretend he was 'socialist' in order to have an 'enemy' to oppose.

The primary reason the USSR is regarded as 'left wing' is because the State owned the businesses rather than capitalists doing so. I am not at all convinced that it is correct to label State-owning-businesses as 'left wing' as to my mind it doesn't gel very well with anything the left has ever stood for or supported. But I will grant you that a lot of people in history have labelled it left-wing. The 'left' likes the idea of workers (cooperatives) or the people (local communities) owning businesses because its core focus is on power to all the people as opposed to only a few. Having businesses controlled and run by a distant authoritarian dictatorship is the opposite of power to the all the people and is precisely the focusing of power in the hands of the few that the left exists to oppose. If the state itself was democratic and if the people had a strong say in how the state was running the businesses, then okay, I can see how it could be argued that that was left-wing because it was putting power into the hands of the people. But in an authoritarian state, taking power out of the hands of the local business owners (the capitalists) and putting it in the hands of the dictatorial state, is doing the opposite of everything the left stands for: It's consolidating power rather than distributing it.

Democratic Socialist writer George Orwell always argued there was no difference between communism and capitalism and that both were equally right-wing, and that if anything, communism had even more authoritarian tendencies than capitalism did.

[KingsGambit]

Is a political spectrum/chart where virtually everybody sits in the same corner a useful metric at all?

[Starlight]

Is a political spectrum/chart where virtually everybody sits in the same corner a useful metric at all?

? I usually use Political Compass's charts.

In their charts, what is typically regarded as the left-wing to right-wing continuum runs from the bottom left to the top right, as I've marked here:

axeswithnames.png
(Don't get confused by the fact that they've labelled their horizontal economic axis as 'left' and 'right', that's only referring to economics and not social elements which are on the vertical axis. The traditional left-wing vs right-wing continuum runs from bottom-left to top-right along the diagonal.)

For most countries, political parties tend to fall roughly along that continuum.

e.g. their graph of New Zealand 2017 elections:

(FWIW I think their placement of TOP is bizarre, and TOP should be about where they've got Greens, but TOP was a new party in the election (who got no seats as it turned out), so I forgive them for having no clue where to put it)

Their graph of the UK 2017 elections:


Their graph of Canada's 2015 elections:


etc.

Now it's fair to ask, "well if people generally fall close to that line, why have 2 dimensions to the graph rather than 1 - why not just have a line and plot them on it?" The answer is that they generally fall close to that line because the difference between left and right has traditionally been about whether power is in the hands of a few (right-wing) versus in the hands of the many (left-wing), and since power has both social and economic dimensions, people who think social power should be in the hands of the many not the few commonly think economic power should be in the hands of the many not the few and vice versa, but not always. The two traditions that defy this correlation are libertarianism (social freedoms for all, but massive economic inequality with economic power residing in the hands of a few billionaires and everyone else fighting for scraps) which sits in the bottom-right corner of the graph and communism (no social freedom, but enforced economic equality, yet economic power itself was absent from the people in historic communist regimes - that is why I disagree with characterizing historical communism as left-wing economically) or an FDR type New-Deal economics but socially controlled society which sit in the top-left corner of the graph.

As I've explained before, my own politics fall very much within that bottom-left square. I usually vote for the Green party in NZ, which political compass plots in that square, though I would say I'm a tad further down and left on the graph than the green party is.

Now, if one wanted, one could drop a perpendicular bisector from where they've plotted Stalin at the top left, down to the traditional diagonal political left-right continuum, and say political compass is effectively plotting Stalin as a centrist (as left-wing on economics as he is right-wing on authoritarianism). Not sure how helpful that is, because what the graph is really telling us is that Stalin is waaaay off the normal spectrum. He's not the normal endpoint of Ghandi-esque / Green party-esque / Bernie Sanders-esque traditional left-wing politics. What kind of frustrates me when people who don't know much about politics bring up Stalin, is they seem to think he is some sort of normal or representative end point of leftist / democratic socialist politics. To me that's a facepalm worthy assumption. Stalin, in the top left corner is as far from my bottom-left corner politics as I am from the libertarians in the bottom right corner or as Stalin is from Margaret Thatcher. Stalin is no more the typical endpoint of my politics than he is of Margaret Thatcher's.

I don't feel a need to particularly have any interest in Stalin's politics because he's nowhere near me on the political spectrum. I haven't read Ayn Rand crazy books and I haven't studied Stalin's Russia: Both are near to as far away from my own politics as it's possible to get and I don't see much value to me in learning more about them as I would think they were both insane so I prioritize other things. My left-wing politics is about empowering all people, socially and economically. I don't see Stalin's dictatorship or economic policies as having done that, so they don't interest me. It was obvious to people even at the time that they didn't do this - George Orwell, who's politics were roughly the same as my own - wrote Animal Farm to point out that there was no difference between communism and capitalism in terms of them both being the rule of the few over the many.

[Starlight]

Dictatorship is a right-wing thing as opposed to democracy which is a left-wing thing (this was pretty much the original definition of the terms in France where they were invented - consolidated people power in the hands of the few versus distributed power in the hands of the people).

I should probably proof-read occasionally.

[Starlight]

Is a political spectrum/chart where virtually everybody sits in the same corner a useful metric at all?

I will note that for most of history, people have not sat in my corner of the political square (bottom left on political compass chart)

e.g. in the US, in the wild-west that was the bottom right corner (libertarian), while predominantly the early US government through to the Great Depression era was top-right corner (standard right-wing - power and wealth was in the hands of the few rich white male slave-owning elites), and then under FDR through to JFK the US was in the top-left corner (Left-wing New Deal economics, coupled with social conservatism), and then Reagan pulled the country strongly back into the top-right quadrant (standard right-wing), and Bill Clinton 'triangulated' the Democrat party into the top-right corner too (consciously moving away from New Deal economics and from being a 'liberal' and pushing for conservative social policies like 'tough on crime' etc). In modern America we have seen a bit of a drift downward on the chart, with libertarianism becoming quite popular, and we have great achievements like better rights for Black people, gay people, openness to legalizing marijuana etc, so in some respects at least you could almost say the country is currently in the bottom-right quadrant (if you ignore the viciousness of police, the drug arrests, and all the wars).

So never in US history has the US been in the bottom-left quadrant (modern 'progessivism' / Bernie Sanders / Green party) - that is the one part of the political compass that the American government has never been in at any stage of its history. However, I note that today in polling Bernie Sanders is the single most popular politician nationally, and the progressive movement in general is very strong, so America may well potentially move to the bottom-left quadrant in the future.

So I do see my own (bottom-left quadrant / modern progressive / green / democratic socialist) politics as being different from anything that has come before (though New Deal economics, and libertarian social policies have both been tried separately at different times in history, just never together), so in a sense you could say I see most political positions in history as similar in the sense of "they are not mine", and you could also say that at certain points in history I think there has been a strong tendency for the entire society to pile itself into the same corner (e.g. especially Reagan + Clinton where there was a concerted rush to get into the top-right quadrant and stay there) and I would say that to a certain extent my own politics operates in a direct opposition to the top-right corner that most establishment politicians currently occupy at this moment of history. Especially because the Reagan+Clinton pile-on into the top right quadrant was repeated around the world in various ways (e.g. in England with Thatcher and then Tony Blair's New Labour, here in NZ with Rogernomics+Ruthanasia, etc) as due to global economic shocks in the 70s and 80s there was a sudden rush to get away from the unions-heavy economies of the 60s and people opted for the economic policies that currently happened to be in fashion (neoliberalism, cutting taxes, deregulation, de-unionization, international trade, 'business-friendly'(='worker unfriendly') policies etc) so most of the Western world did a concerted and deliberate move to the top-right quadrant in the 80s and 90s, even the traditionally 'left-wing' parties (Democrats, Labour etc), and I will admit that my own politics is influenced by and operates in opposition to that move and the problems it has caused.

But since effectively my position is "Let's combine modern social freedoms, with New Deal economics", I don't see "but, but, Stalin!" as an interesting or relevant response to that. He had neither modern social freedoms nor New Deal economics, so he has zero to do with my views, other than that some people have a desire that I think is somewhat bizarre to stick the same labels on us (of "left-wing" or "socialist") which is strange because our positions could hardly be more opposite.

[rogue06]

Stalin was a dictator. Dictatorship is a right-wing thing as opposed to democracy which is a left-wing thing

And folks there we have it. In starlight-land Stalin was a right-winger.

[Starlight]

And folks there we have it. In starlight-land Stalin was a right-winger.

My point more generally was that Stalin was well outside the normal left-right continuum. Calling him 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' is problematic due to the large differences between him and any part of today's political spectrum.

But, if pushed, my view is that the best lens to view him through is probably that of an authoritarian dictator, and that's a "right-wing" model for rule. I would say the public (mis)conception of him as "left-wing" owes more to propaganda (both on Stalin's part, and that of the US) than it does to any good reasons for labeling him "left-wing".

[One Bad Pig]

My point more generally was that Stalin was well outside the normal left-right continuum. Calling him 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' is problematic due to the large differences between him and any part of today's political spectrum.

But, if pushed, my view is that the best lens to view him through is probably that of an authoritarian dictator, and that's a "right-wing" model for rule. I would say the public (mis)conception of him as "left-wing" owes more to propaganda (both on Stalin's part, and that of the US) than it does to any good reasons for labeling him "left-wing".

Your argument transparently boils down to "I don't like authoritarian rule, and I don't like the right wing, therefore authoritarians are right wing."

[Zymologist]

Your argument transparently boils down to "I don't like authoritarian rule, and I don't like the right wing, therefore authoritarians are right wing."

The idea that authoritarianism is a right-wing thing is ridiculous. Starlight's view of right vs left seems to be very simplistic...kind of an "us = good, them = bad" paradigm.

[rogue06]

My point more generally was that Stalin was well outside the normal left-right continuum. Calling him 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' is problematic due to the large differences between him and any part of today's political spectrum.

But, if pushed, my view is that the best lens to view him through is probably that of an authoritarian dictator, and that's a "right-wing" model for rule. I would say the public (mis)conception of him as "left-wing" owes more to propaganda (both on Stalin's part, and that of the US) than it does to any good reasons for labeling him "left-wing".

Stalin was a devout Communist which lands pretty square in the normal left-right continuum. It looks like you are relying on a variation of the "No True Scotsman" argument to claim otherwise.