@seawulf575 “You are the one that took the conversation that direction so it is not a non sequitur. I was right in line with the conversation. And while I find Sanders, Clinton and Schultz to be comedic, my response was not. So non sequitur is the wrong term.”
The term ”non sequitur” has nothing to do with comedy or the direction of the conversation in this context. I even provided you a link to make it clear that I was using the term in its context as an informal logical fallacy. So perhaps you should do more than a quick Google search before accusing me of being the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In any case, the non sequitur fallacy here is reasoning from “persons A, B, and C cannot articulate the difference between an X and a Y” to “there is no difference between an X and a Y.” This simply does not follow (“it does not follow” being the literal translation of ”non sequitur,” by the way). And of course, that’s not even getting into the possibility that Sanders, Clinton, and Wasserman Schultz may have reasons for not articulating the difference independent of their ability to do so.
“Sanders, Clinton, and Schultz (SCS) did not answer the question for one of two reasons.”
Okay, so we’ve gone from you only recognizing one possible reason to you admitting that there are at least two possible reasons. But note that “there is more than just one possible reason” was one of the points I was making, so at least we’re making some progress.
”[Either] they can’t distinguish the difference between a modern Democrat and a Socialist or they have some political reason for not wanting to answer. Those are the exact same thing when there is no difference.”
And they are not the exact same thing when there is a difference. So let’s ask ourselves: is there a difference? And the answer is “yes.” In fact, there are several differences. For one, the Democrats are a political party with an evolving and changing platform, whereas socialism is an approach to economic organization involving collective ownership of the means of production (which in turn means that a Democrat is any person sincerely registered in that political party regardless of their specific set of political beliefs, whereas a socialist is a person who espouses economic views falling within a specific range).
For another, most Democrats are capitalists, whereas no socialists are capitalists. But of course, Democrats typically do not adhere to the same version of capitalism as Republicans. There are exceptions and outliers in any political party, of course, but the Democratic Party (and the majority of mainstream Democrats) tends to support a mixed economy approach, whereas Republicans favor a modified version of laissez faire capitalism.
One complication here, however, is that an economy can be mixed in more than one way. There are both capitalist and socialist versions of the mixed economy approach, and one of the tensions in the Democratic Party is that mainstream Democrats favor the capitalist version while democratic socialists (many of whom have registered as Democrats to avoid the fate of being a small and ignored third party) favor the socialist version.
But while there are socialists in the Democratic Party and its voter coalition, that does not mean that the Democratic Party is a socialist party, nor that the majority of Democrats (aka “mainstream Democrats”) are socialist. The existence of such a wing, however, could explain why neither Clinton nor Wasserman Schultz wanted to answer the question in a way that would alienate potential voters. And since it is difficult to give an answer that is both concise enough for television and clear enough to make sense without alienating voters, they would have a pretty strong motivation to deflect the question and talk about something else instead (which is what both of them did).
Sanders, meanwhile, was not actually asked the difference between a Democrat and a socialist. He was asked how the two groups were different with regards to taxation. Furthermore, it is in his political interests to conflate the two since one of the things he is attempting to do is pull the Democratic Party to the (actual) left. So his answer of “I don’t know” could just as easily be a matter of politics as a matter of ignorance or inability. Note that I am not saying which it was, just that there is more than one reasonable possibility (thus blocking our ability to make an easy deduction from what he said to what is actually the case).
“Someone being unable to distinguish the two positions doesn’t automatically make someone a leftist.”
Yes, that was my point. Glad to see you’ve come around.
“The fact that they are trying to represent the Democratic party and cannot differentiate that party with Socialism shows that both are so far on the same side of the political spectrum that they differentiate no longer.”
But again, we don’t have sufficient evidence that they cannot differentiate the two. All we know is that they did not. And also again, their inability—if, indeed, it is an inability and not merely a refusal—does not automatically make them a leftist. Moreover, you already agreed to this (see previous quote). So you’re just going around in circles here.
Also, Sanders was not trying to represent the Democratic Party. He was trying to infiltrate it.
“Sanders and Clinton were the leading Democratic presidential candidates right up until the primary when the party had to pick one”
This is a silly thing to say. By way of comparison, let’s look at the 2008 Democratic primary. Would you say that there were eight leading candidates in that race? Of course not. There were three leading candidates (Obama, Clinton, and Edwards) and five who were just along for the ride (Biden, Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich, and Richardson). But if there are only two people in a race, it doesn’t make sense to say they are both in the lead. This is true whether we are talking about the 2008 primary once it was down to Clinton and Obama or the 2016 race once it was down to Clinton and Sanders.
“Trying to dodge that is weak, though not unexpected out of a liberal. I need say no more.”
I think you rather do need to say more given that I am not a liberal. As I have mentioned a few times on this site, I am a libertarian.
Note: that’s “lowercase-l” libertarian, not “capital-L” Libertarian. I am not a member of any political party, nor have I ever been.
“Viewed through any lens you like except the rose colored glasses you wear, Clinton is left going on far left.”
This makes no sense. Rose-colored glasses show us what we want to see rather than what is really there. But if you think that I’m a liberal (again, I am not), and if you think that liberals are far to the left (and again, they are not), then rose-colored glasses shouldn’t be the only lenses through which Clinton doesn’t appear to be far to the left.
“Her social policies and views, her desires for larger government and more governmental control, her efforts at socialization of many, many thing all throw her directly in the left to far left arena.”
Can you give any specifics here? It is certainly the case that Clinton’s social policies are less to the right than those of mainstream Republicans, and Democrats have always been more in favor of economic interventionism than the Republicans (this being one of the big differences between mixed economy approaches to capitalism and more laissez-faire approaches to capitalism). But I can’t think of a single thing that Clinton wants to socialize that hasn’t already been socialized.
Perhaps you are thinking of health care, but Clinton does not support socialized medicine (and is ambiguous about her support for a single-payer system). In fact, her controversial 1993 health care plan resembles the ACA far more than it resembles the Sanders “Medicare for all” plan (not least because almost every provision of Obama’s health care plan that Clinton criticized during the primaries wound up being changed to the version she preferred while the ACA was making its way through Congress).
In any case, Clinton has never supported collective ownership of the means of production. So she is certainly no socialist.
Quick reminder: socialized medicine is not just universal coverage or even when the government pays the bills. It is when the government owns the hospitals and employs the health care workers.
“Besides, if she had right wing views you wouldn’t support her at all.”
I have never supported her.
“At what time have I ever stated I viewed the world entirely in terms of Democrat v Republican?”
At what time have I ever stated that you have stated that you view the world entirely in terms of Democrat v Republican? The answer to both of our questions is “never.” What I did say is that “it’s only when someone’s political knowledge is so narrow that they view politics entirely in terms of the Democrats versus the Republicans that one can justify saying that the Democrats are to the left and the Republicans are to the right.”
Explicit statements are not entirely to the point here, however, as I was talking about what is implicit in one’s world view. Saying that the Democrats are far to the left reveals an ignorance of the breadth of political thought. When we look at the world as a whole, we see that there are viewpoints far more to the left than those of the Democrats. If you were restricting your claims to mainstream American politics only, then I would agree that the Democrats are to the relative left and that Republicans are to the relative right. But again, mainstream American politics is a fight over a very small patch of land. When people point out that the Democrats are not actual leftists, they are speaking from outside the rather narrow and limited paradigm of mainstream American politics.
“The PoliticalCompass model is a partial model at the very best.”
I am aware. That’s why I said that it is not perfect, but good enough for illustrating a simple point (specifically, the point that a group can be to the relative left or right of another group without being to the right or left in any broader or absolute sense).
“It looks at economy and authority-libertarianism paradigms only. That is the basic idea behind the Nolan Chart as well (and is really just a modified version of it) but both fail to look at a wider range of issues. And because of that flaw, both are useful, but not the best we can do.”
I agree completely. And when I use it in class, it is as the second of four models that I present. The first is the basic left-right spectrum that most people (especially most people of college age) are familiar with. Then I problematize it by asking my students to place certain political figures, policies, or positions on that spectrum until they realize that simply looking at things in terms of left and right is insufficient. Next, I move on to the Political Compass (which I prefer to the Nolan chart because it doesn’t allow people to just hide in the center and/or pretend they have no preferences or political leanings). Then I problematize that chart in the same way as the first and move on to a modified version of the Vosem chart, which gets problematized by comparing it with other three-dimensional political charts (all of which are measuring different, but important, third dimensions). The point is to both expand their thinking and make clear the limits of this kind of classification (which is useful for some purposes, but incapable of covering all of the relevant dimensions).
“I can pick an economic stance and claim that represents a person on the chart.”
That is not how the Political Compass works. Any given person’s place on the chart is determined by the totality of their publicly available views on issues related to each axis and takes into account both what they support and how strongly they support it. There’s still a lot of room for error and misrepresentation (which is one reason that looking at trends is in many ways more interesting than obsessing over any given person’s absolute coordinates), but it’s only supposed to be one tool in the box anyways.
“That is what your chart did with people”
You do realize it’s not my chart, right? I did not design or score it. As already stated, all I have done is present it as a good enough way of illustrating a simple point.
