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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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You're kind of contradicting yourself. On one hand you are saying two extremists then later about that Biden is right centre.
I agree with the later part. At this moment we have one extremist and one right center guy. The reason Biden is running is to be still appealing to Republicans and independents to dissuade them from voting for trump.
Though, so much effort was put by media to make him look like he is Karl Marx reincarnated.
It is a little bit of a contradiction and I had a hard time following the logic. But your post made me think of something else. If you have one extremist candidate by definition you have two, because from the perspective of the followers of the atypical extremist candidate (a trump like figure) status quo will be an extreme for them
Extremism needs to be judged by the standards of that party in this context. An extreme Democrat is either a radical socialist like Bernie Sanders, or utterly non-progressive like Biden. Likewise extremist for the GOP would be a fascist like Trump, or someone so far left as to almost qualify as a progressive.
I can't help but notice that you couldn't come up with leftist GOP extremist.
I think you were able to do it with Democrats was because Democrats are really everyone else who doesn't identify themselves as Republicans. With the first past the post, those different parties have no option but to work together as one.
I couldn't list the left of the GOP because I don't honestly follow the GOP besides the nearly daily disgust at the things they do. There has to be a far left for the GOP, I'm just not sure who that is (probably because they aren't making the headlines, just quietly doing what they can to hold back the rest of the monsters in their party). Whose the least offensive Republican you can think of? That's probably the far left for them.
Democratic socialism isn’t “radical.”
Biden is extremist by the standards of progressives in that he's basically not progressive. He's not a moderate Democrat, he's far right of the DNC, which puts him ever so slightly to the left of the GOP. The only viable candidate for the DNC given FPTP was either going to be far right or far left, and with the push by their core to make sure Bernie was out of the running far right it was.
Biden is not far right of the DNC, that's an asinine claim. If anything he's towards the left of the DNC. The DNC is just right-center as a whole. (There are obvious exceptions in true progressives that are under the Dem banner because of fptp, but there are like 10 of them or something).
I think the confusion in this case is also a symptom of the problem. On the one hand you have the voters and on the other hand you have the politicians. By the standards of DNC voters, Biden is far right. His platform was basically undo Trump then don't change anything after that. That's not progressive and it's not what DNC voters really wanted, but it was the best option they were given.
On the other hand you have DNC politicians. By their standards Biden might be center of the pack, but only because most of them are clumped up over on the far right. There are very few actual moderate Democrats these days. There are a handful of extremists out on the far left like Bernie, a few moderates in the middle, in then the vast majority over on the far right that a couple decades ago would have been considered Republicans.
Democrat voters haven't really changed, but the politicians have shifted right as Republicans have moved ever further right. That's why Democrat voters are unhappy with Biden, they're looking for a moderate candidate, not as extreme as Bernie, but looking to make actual reforms. That's why they loved Obama, he talked a big game on the campaign trail, and once in office was really good at spinning most of his compromises as wins (just look at Obamacare, literally a Republican healthcare plan that was somehow spun as the socialized healthcare Democrats had been pushing for).
Words have meaning. Far right is literally fascists and Nazis. Are you saying that Biden is a fascist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
You're missing the point, it's a relative scale. You're talking about far right relative to all the parties. I'm talking about relative to just the Democrats or just the Republicans. Think about the current political parties in the US as a pair of just barely overlapping bell curves. The left bell curve is the Democrats and the right bell curve is the Republicans. With each of those there's a central and a far right and far left. Trump is far right for the Republicans, and so far off the chart for Democrats to not even be visible. Biden is far right for Democrats which puts him on the far left for Republicans. Bernie is far left for Democrats, which much line Trump puts him so far off the chart for Republicans that he's not even visible.
FPTP makes the most viable candidates for either party the ones that sit at either end of those bell curves. You either need to be as far away from the other party as possible or so close that you practically qualify for the other party. Landing in the middle of either extreme results in a loss during either the primaries or the general election.
Biden is not closer to the GOP than the DNC. Either you are idolizing the GOP in thinking Biden could represent their platform, or you misunderstand that the DNC is not so far left from Bidens platform. Bernie is literally a different party but ran on the democratic platform for the elections, but the DNC itself identifies with Biden and Clinton politics.