> What liberal values? The democrats strongly supported...
Democrats are moderate conservatives, not liberals. There are no liberal parties - and certainly no left-wing parties - anywhere in the American mainstream.
People need to stop applying the terms "right" and "left" to politics as if they had objective meaning. There was a time that right wing meant monarchist and left wing meant democrat. Then there came a time when right wing meant imperialist-capitalist and left wing meant Marxist. The terms shift in meaning constantly and always simply refer to the two major factions in power at any time.
I happen to agree with this, and I have a question about it if you wouldn't mind answering.
Can you elaborate on some policies that a truly liberal party would promote (that we don't see in the US)? Numerous countries in Europe have what are often defined as highly liberal parties by American standards. What do they do, what policies do they champion, that the liberal wing of the Democrat Party in the US doesn't? And so on.
(and by liberal here, I'm speaking of what's considered a modern left wing party by European standards (or "socialist" in some circles); versus classic liberalism that would have defined the near laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century)
You don't even need to look to Europe. Just look to American politics in the 1970's. I'll give a very concrete example of an issue I happen to care about: environmentalism. In the 1960's and 1970's, the environmental movement was about protecting nature for the value of nature itself. The Wilderness Act of 1964 uses the language:
"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Today, the intellectual mainstream of the movement has shifted to neoclassical economic justifications: the value of environmental services provided by e.g. wetlands and mountain ranges, the potential economic costs of climate change, market failures resulting from the externalities of pollution. The progressivism and idealism is gone, replaced with detailed analysis of how pro-environment policies fit into our existing economic and value structure.
Well yeah, because like most political movements they're subverted as vehicles for power and the original motivation for their existence is just a loose excuse to gain more power. The result ends up being enormous amounts of money going in to feed thousands of regulations and government employees that really only pay lip service to the original intent of the movement or organization.
It's the reason why my default position with any government proposal is: scale it back, refactor what you already have, make due with less money, less laws, and less bureaucrats.
> ell yeah, because like most political movements they're subverted as vehicles for power and the original motivation for their existence is just a loose excuse to gain more power.
Ah yes, the environmental movement is just an excuse to increase government power, not to protect innocent people from vicious, ruthless, remorseless businessmen who have no compunction about dumping dangerous waste into lakes that people drink out of and swim in, as long as doing so saves them a buck.
It's not about the environmentalists who care and actually make the world a better place by stopping toxic dumping. It's the people who come along later and take over positions of power who torment ordinary citizens for filling a ditch on their own property, claiming that the ditch was "wetlands". It's the California coastal douchebags who aren't protecting jack shit on the coast but won't let you replace LITERALLY rotten boards in your own house because of a morass of idiotic rules, regulations, and and endless stream of power-happy "environmentalists".
Socialized Health Care is a big one. Single payer in particular: back when Obama was able to force through the ACA, he was unable (or unwilling) to get support for a single payer system a la Canada or much or Europe, and instead settled for a plan that was basically designed by conservatives a decade earlier. A truly liberal party would have fought for single payer, rather than the halfway-but-not-enough plan we got.
A truly progressive liberal party would promote (in no particular order):
* Universal single payer health care. This is a no-brainer for anyone more interested in broad outcomes than ideology, narrow interests and grandstanding: universal health care is by all measures vastly cheaper, fairer and more effective than the monumental fustercluck that is American health care.
The American health care debate is instructive insofar as it reveals the fault lines of American power: the only reason there's a debate at all is that some sectors of American business want public health care (mainly manufacturing companies with established workforces) and others don't.
It also illustrates the power of the Overton Window. When the Democrats proposed universal health care in the 1990s, the Republicans countered with a more market-based approach. By the time the Democrats approached the issue again under Obama, it was already more market-based than the Republican counter-offer had been, but the Republicans just continued to shift their demands to the right faster than the Democrats could accommodate them.
The result is an abomination of a policy that leaves everyone disappointed and/or outraged.
* A legislative framework that protects worker rights, including workplace safety, overtime, vacation, maternity/parental leave and the right to unionize. America's record is deplorable on all these measures.
* A constitutional and legislative framework that protects human rights in the broad sense developed over the 20th century, including the so-called rights revolutions against discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and so on.
The US has led some important victories on this, driven mostly by the robustness of its Bill of Rights, but that Bill is also hobbled by an essentially 18th century, classical liberal view of rights. As a result, so-called "strict constructionists" have a legal wedge they can use to undermine the rights frameworks built on implicit legal extensions of the Bill of Rights' measures.
The Constitutions of some other countries (e.g. Canada, where I live) have moved forward to a more inclusive understanding of rights that embeds the 20th century rights extensions into the text instead of pasting them on with legal duct tape.
* Real gun control. Further to the essentially 18th century character of the Bill of Rights is the idea running through it that the only thing that stops governments from tyranny is the threat of revolution. America's own political history, coupled with the reality of dozens of other industrialized liberal democracies, demonstrates that governmental accountability flows not from the barrel of a musket but from robust democratic institutions and traditions, broad civic engagement, civil disobedience and so on.
* Real intellectual property reform: in particular copyrights and patents, which are profoundly dysfunctional.
* Real military policy reform. The US single-handedly spends about half of the entire planet's military budget. That's a staggering missed opportunity to spend that money on the development of social and economic justice.
* Progressive taxation. It's odious that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, and it has allowed for a society in which the wealthiest 1 percent controls 35% of the wealth, the wealthiest 5 percent controls 62% of the wealth, the wealthiest 15 percent controls 74% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% control just 0.2% of the wealth.
Progressive taxation would ameliorate that, and far from killing the economy would actually make it much stronger by moving money from people who have more than they need to people who don't have enough. The US is currently so far to the left of the peak of the Laffer Curve that real top marginal tax rates can go up significantly before any nonsense about reverse trickle-down will ever kick in.
* Real campaign finance reform. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision was a travesty of liberal democracy. American governments, parties and elections are fundamentally and thoroughly corrupt (in the Lawrence Lessig sense) and that financial corruption makes every other policy on this list more or less impossible to achieve.
Democrats are moderate conservatives, not liberals. There are no liberal parties - and certainly no left-wing parties - anywhere in the American mainstream.