Has the left/democratic party become a cult?

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naturalplastic
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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.



K_Kelly
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21 Sep 2017, 2:08 pm

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
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".


That's actually true.

That's why the world needs legitimate leftism.


I agree that lobbying got us into this big mess we are in today. But why do you seem to be saying that corporations and the "free-market" are inherently bad or anti-democratic?



Dear_one
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21 Sep 2017, 2:38 pm

K_Kelly wrote:
I agree that lobbying got us into this big mess we are in today. But why do you seem to be saying that corporations and the "free-market" are inherently bad or anti-democratic?


I'd second that without hesitation. Various American founding fathers have written that you cannot have democracy and major economic inequality together. The theory is one person, one vote, but money obviously affects election results. Now, even Jimmy Carter says that the US is a Plutocracy.

The "free market" sounds great in the textbooks, but there, the baker and the carpenter are economic equals. In practice, and by design, capitalism concentrates wealth to a single point, oblivious to all other values and dangers.



techstepgenr8tion
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21 Sep 2017, 7:03 pm

Dear_one wrote:
Then E.O. Wilson was harassed into moving on from his discovery of Sociobiology, which begins to uncover women's less savoury motivations.

This is part of what I love about Bret Weinstein, as well as how awesome it was to hear him and Jordan Peterson together - that could only be topped by bringing Gad Saad into the conversation.

When there aren't strong civic values or philosophies to look toward as touchstones we tend to fall back on genetic atavisms which, by themselves, are largely amoral and more often than not even when they're moral at their core (such as cooperation and the like) they get misused or used against those who either don't know where their emotions and motivations come from or don't care.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin