The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP’s policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary. Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections. As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — mainly, Joe Biden, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — the party’s head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling.
The mounds of data to which I refer comes from Thomas Piketty, the French political economist who made waves with his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” This paper, entitled “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict,” analyzes around 70 years of post-election surveys from three countries — Britain, the United States and France — to comprehend how Western politics have changed in that […]
Voting is an individual thing that involves a person’s beliefs and more importantly their knowledge. We all have less knowledge when the corporate news outlets are concerned more with capital gains than with people’s health and wellbeing. If we only had a truthful source of information within the media, we could see Piketty’s viewpoint and probable solutions to our Democratic leader’s problems with comprehension of the problems facing the lower 99% of our voting population. Then the DNC could probably change their outlook about possibly changing to a less central ideology and trying to pick up on a more socialistic democracy which is more inclusive of ideas of people like Sanders, who really has the entirety of citizens in his outlook, I believe.
PS: Social Democracy is a far better one than the “Neo-liberal” capitalist style of democracy we now have which is owned by the rich, and run by the rich.