House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called for Republicans to “get their act together” and elect the next speaker while slamming the “extremists” within their party.

  • minorninth@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Even ignoring the part where you didn’t realize Jeffries is a Democrat, this is just not a fair characterization of Democrats at all, as if they’re all the same.

    Democrats in congress represent a broad spectrum from quite liberal to moderate conservative. Even by European standards.

    • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I will just have to disagree. I think when you get down to brass tacks, basic stuff like human rights, freedoms, autonomy, etc are largely bipartisan.

      For example, between traditional conservative and liberal discussion in a successful country where religion has been removed from the equation, they would both very much agree that women should be allowed to have bodily autonomy and be allowed to have abortions up to a reasonable limit, lots of countries typically go with 3 months. And thats just for healthy pregnancies, when it comes to physical problems usually the limit is removed.

      The actual discourse between a liberal and conservative traditionally should be "who is going to pay for that abortion", not if it can even happen at all.

      The fact we havent even gotten that far in political discussion in the united states now means we are losing the ability to even benchmark how liberal vs conservative the Democrat party is, because we are no longer really debating "who is gonna pay for x/y/z", its now being debated "should we even allow people to do x/y/z"

      Which is no longer a Conservative vs Liberal discussion. It's a traditional Authoritarian vs Libertarian discussion.

      And if all the discussion has become purely Authoritarianism vs Libertarianism, we have gone completely off the rails because the United States is supposed to be a largely libertarian (within reason) government. It used to be the literal benchmark for Libertarianism, being extremely progressive in human rights. Letting your nation arm itself? Being one of the earliest countries to include women in voting? Every step of the way countries used to lag behind the US as it abolished slavery, brought it's races and cultures together, women were walking topless down the street, people could own pretty much anything they wanted to via legal channels, you name it.

      For the longest time whenever the discussions came up, it was more about $$$, who paid for what, what would vs wouldn't be taxpayer funded. And a lot of stuff used to be taxpayer funded. The USPS used to be one of the shining examples of what a well oiled taxpayer funded system could look like.

      But over time that has walked backwards and degraded, the Conservatives have largely completed their goal of slashing and hamstringing nearly every taxpayer public system of the US, the country is at best on life support now. Every single public system you can think of in the US is barely functioning at best, straight up privatized at worst.

      Like the US has private prisons now, lol.

      It stopped being a Conservative vs Liberal debate decades ago, it's now pretty much entirely Authoritarian vs Libertarian now. The country stopped fighting for public funding and now the fight has shifted to fighting for basic human rights, the very principle the country was founded on hundreds of years ago.

      The US has become the very precise thing the founding father's explicitly tried to escape from.