Has the left/democratic party become a cult?

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Bataar
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18 Sep 2017, 5:47 pm

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
Clinton.

-She supported TPP
-She said we will never have "single payer"
-She said she wanted middle class tax cuts
-She's called the "War Machine" because of her many votes for war
-She refused to support $15 "living wage".
-She championed Bill's "welfare reform" which reduced welfare eligible

That's the Democrat party.

That's why they're called "neoliberal", because they're free-market people like many Republicans.


You're right again.

Wouldn't it be nice if America had real leftism?

You mean ruled over by a dictatorial government? No way.



DarthMetaKnight
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18 Sep 2017, 6:00 pm

Bataar wrote:
DarthMetaKnight wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
Clinton.

-She supported TPP
-She said we will never have "single payer"
-She said she wanted middle class tax cuts
-She's called the "War Machine" because of her many votes for war
-She refused to support $15 "living wage".
-She championed Bill's "welfare reform" which reduced welfare eligible

That's the Democrat party.

That's why they're called "neoliberal", because they're free-market people like many Republicans.


You're right again.

Wouldn't it be nice if America had real leftism?

You mean ruled over by a dictatorial government? No way.


Image


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B19
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18 Sep 2017, 6:17 pm

The differences between political and religious cults discussed in this interesting essay:
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2 ... rump-cult/



BettaPonic
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18 Sep 2017, 8:06 pm

I think when you have two teams competing it can get cultish. The left and right both sometimes strike me as cults. I do see plenty of reasonable people who just have different opinions from each other though.



DarthMetaKnight
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18 Sep 2017, 8:14 pm

BettaPonic wrote:
I think when you have two teams competing it can get cultish. The left and right both sometimes strike me as cults. I do see plenty of reasonable people who just have different opinions from each other though.


To be honest, I think that political people (on both sides) throw around the word "cult" too frequently. It's a word that stirs people up emotionally ... so that thinking becomes more difficult.

Don't get me wrong. Some political movements are literally cults. For example, the LaRouche movement is a cult.

Conservatives aren't cultists. They're just blinded by nostalgia. That doesn't make you a cultist. It makes you a person who has some emotional issues to work out.

Some liberals are rational. Others become too extreme due to megalomania and vanity ... but that still doesn't make you a cultist.


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BettaPonic
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18 Sep 2017, 9:08 pm

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
BettaPonic wrote:
I think when you have two teams competing it can get cultish. The left and right both sometimes strike me as cults. I do see plenty of reasonable people who just have different opinions from each other though.


To be honest, I think that political people (on both sides) throw around the word "cult" too frequently. It's a word that stirs people up emotionally ... so that thinking becomes more difficult.

Don't get me wrong. Some political movements are literally cults. For example, the LaRouche movement is a cult.

Conservatives aren't cultists. They're just blinded by nostalgia. That doesn't make you a cultist. It makes you a person who has some emotional issues to work out.

Some liberals are rational. Others become too extreme due to megalomania and vanity ... but that still doesn't make you a cultist.

I think cult has become one of those words that has gotten a wider meaning. I see it really used with group thinking these days.



sly279
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19 Sep 2017, 2:55 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
The left seems much more propagandized.

Actual ideas don't seem to matter.

A Democrat can say "racist" or "sexist" and millions of simple-minded Democrats follow.


Have you seen how the populist right hangs on every word out of Trump's mouth? He can say the most insane thing, and they'll support it without question. Anything critical of their Dear Leader is without question fake news. Sounds rather cultish to me.

Republicans:
-free trade
-no "single payer" heath care
-tax cuts
-hands-off-government
-cut welfare
-pro-military

Democrats have the same policies .. but they lie to their followers ...and say they are otherwise ...

Millions of simple-minded people follow them, because, they say, "Trump is a racist".


Who says all Democrats are secretly in tune with Republicans about that list?
Millions of simple minded people follow Trump because he says he'll make America great again - - by keeping out brown people immigrants, by demonizing unpopular minorities, and by implying that prejudices are okay.


Millions of simpleminded peopl followed obama cause " hope and change"
Trump is hardly the first president to use non binding slogan.



sly279
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19 Sep 2017, 2:57 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
The left seems much more propagandized.

Actual ideas don't seem to matter.

A Democrat can say "racist" or "sexist" and millions of simple-minded Democrats follow.


Have you seen how the populist right hangs on every word out of Trump's mouth? He can say the most insane thing, and they'll support it without question. Anything critical of their Dear Leader is without question fake news. Sounds rather cultish to me.

Same can be said for the left
Politician. " guns are bad guns are scary"
Liberals" omg they said guns are bad and scary let's ban them, i dont know what or how guns work but they said they scary"
Anything you say about th right can't be flipped right back at the left.



sly279
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19 Sep 2017, 2:59 am

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
Clinton.

-She supported TPP
-She said we will never have "single payer"
-She said she wanted middle class tax cuts
-She's called the "War Machine" because of her many votes for war
-She refused to support $15 "living wage".
-She championed Bill's "welfare reform" which reduced welfare eligible

That's the Democrat party.

That's why they're called "neoliberal", because they're free-market people like many Republicans.


You're right again.

Wouldn't it be nice if America had real leftism?

And what do say is the real left?



Moonlight Path
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20 Sep 2017, 8:12 am

Democrats and Republicans seem like the same thing anymore anyway :roll: .........



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20 Sep 2017, 11:21 pm

sly279 wrote:
And what do say is the real left?


When disadvantaged people fight for their rights, that is leftism.

Right now, the biggest problem with the world is the war machine. I'm not saying that militaries are inherently bad. I'm saying that the US military is controlled by the US government, which has been heavily corrupted by corporate puppeteers.

We need to free the US government from corporate chains. That way, America can become an actual democracy for the first time in history. In such a world, the US military would actually serve and protect the American people.

The first step is telling people about what's happening, since most people have a very poor understanding of how lobbying works. We need to tell the conspiracy nuts that "the Illuminati" is really just corporate lobbyists. It's not even a secret. The evidence is all over the place and people reject it because it kinda sounds like a conspiracy theory.

We can come up with solutions once the masses have been informed. We shall use the internet for this task. It's hard to come up with solutions just yet, since we haven't even fully assembled our revolutionary movement yet.

Noam Chomsky is a true leftist. In fact, he one of the truest leftists ever. Read about him

Stake woke my friends. 8)


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jrjones9933
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20 Sep 2017, 11:28 pm

Real leftists also favor turning the tax code away from favoring what economists call rent-seeking.

Established industries erect lots of barriers to competition, not the ones that their lobbyists complain about, though.

Some go so far as to point out the many harms caused by remote, impersonal ownership of capital altogether.

I expected none of that from Hill.


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20 Sep 2017, 11:29 pm

Moonlight Path wrote:
Democrats and Republicans seem like the same thing anymore anyway :roll: .........

... because the Democrats screwed over Bernie.

If Bernie had won the primaries, the American people would have actually had a real choice in the 2016 election.

That's why voter turnout has been so low lately. The candidates that win the primaries are usually corporate shills. Thus, they agree with one another on every issue that is truly important.

The military-industrial complex is probably the most destructive thing on the planet right now. Nether Clinton nor Trump were committed to its destruction.

Clinton and Trump mainly differed in terms of tone. Clinton was polite. Trump was edgy.

Reality Check: The US military is under near-total corporate control. Compared to this, tone is practically nothing.


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21 Sep 2017, 5:42 am

https://www.voanews.com/a/study-says-us ... 28371.html

Quote:
The two major U.S. political parties have distorted the rules of elections and the legislative process to avoid competing directly with each other, according to the analysis released Wednesday.

This has created a political leadership that increasingly emphasizes differences rather than common goals, while focusing more on the interests of donors, special interests and primary voters than the country as a whole. If the competition were healthy between the parties, the analysis said, political leaders and policymakers would be competing to deliver better outcomes for voters and also be held accountable for any results.


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21 Sep 2017, 7:18 am

I realized this over a decade ago, as regards Feminism. I have supported equality all my life, but I noticed that they had taken it to always mean "more for us." When one friend in a discussion group was delighted that a troop of baboons had been observed without a male leader, I brought in more research on their habits, including female infanticide, and she got all her friends to swear off reading primate studies. Then E.O. Wilson was harassed into moving on from his discovery of Sociobiology, which begins to uncover women's less savoury motivations. Now, there are marches for women's rights and gay rights, but the men's rights meetings are broken up by women.

A cult is a shared system of belief that is not open to question, so I'd definitely class feminism as a cult rather than a science, and it has taken over the left with a false analogy between gender and race. I could poke holes in their logic all month if anyone here is interested.



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21 Sep 2017, 8:05 am

Neither actual political party operates like a cult as defined by the video in the OP. The video does not support the original poster's assertion that the Dems (or either party) has any of the diagnostic traits of a cult. And the original poster within their own OP wandered from that point anyway to state that both sides were "cults". But the OP is talking left and right. The two ends of the political spectrum are not quite the same thing as the two political parties.

But the nation IS more polarized than it used to be. But there also seems to be more infighting within each group as well. Both the GOP and the Dems had populist uprisings in the last election. So I don't see how either the left nor the right is any more "cult-like" than it ever was.

To be a cult the first thing you need is a charismatic leader. The Dems don't even have that basic. The GOP does have that in Trump. But what he "leads" is his own base which isn't really the same thing as the GOP (he drew a lot of Dem voters and alienated a lot GOP voters). And at the moment Trump is even more at odds with his own party than he is with the Dems. So if he is trying to make the GOP into his "cult" then he is a failed cult leader.

In the 1994 Congressional election folks who had been southern "Dixiecrats" defected en masse from the Democratic party to the smaller GOP. This caused the two parties to become even in size. And it caused the Dems to become uniform in ideology. The GOP also lost its liberal members in congress at that time.