center left extremism?

more adventures in perceptive redshift

clearly, the fashionable practice among the self described “progressives” these days is to define anything not in complete accord with one’s own worldview as “far right” and “fascist” and “literally worse than hitler.” it’s all a “threat to democracy” and “dictatorship.”

what makes this extended bout of political tourette’s all the more striking is that many of those so commonly singled out for the most aggressive of the opprobrium and accusation are, quite literally, the one time center left.

donald trump, elon musk, tulsi gabbard, RFK, the list goes on and on: the swamp donkey leadership seems compelled to call each and all of them out over absolutely everything and “far right extremism” has (astonishingly) actually eclipsed “racist” as the most overused epithet in american political history.

the left is claiming that the right has become extreme and lost its mind and is going “full hitler” and seeking to end america forever and, amusingly, the right is basically making the same claims about the left.

i referred to this in a prior piece as the “ perceptive redshift” problem (a reference to doppler effects on light).

it basically works like this:

the whole of the situation starts to look like a sort of relativity problem with multiple moving bodies where, depending on whose frame of reference we call “stationary,” the others can be said to be moving and as a result some have tried to dismiss the whole of the accusation/counter accusation as simply being a subjective morass subject to personal preference, but i do not believe that this is so.

i believe that actual movement from past positions can be measured and that when it is, it not only shows that the whole of the apparent move comes from the left moving incredibly far to the far left and abandoning past positions, but that the right itself has actually also moved left to the point where much of being a MAGA republican or a DOGE devotee actually looks pretty much exactly like what being a middle of the road center leftist looked like in the US 15-20 years ago.

the right did not become radical, the left did.

mostly, the most motivated part of the right emerged from what was the center left.

you all know my penchant for letting people speak in their own words (and for receipts) so, let’s look.

i have put my best gato on the case.

here is noted far right extremist nanci pelosi speaking about medicare in 2010:

“we cannot keep our promises on medicare we simply must make the cuts in waste, fraud and abuse… we owe it to our seniors, we owe it to our country!”

now, obviously, this is the kind of talk today that gets you immediately thrown in the “literally worse than wermacht” bin on CNN, real firebrand stuff. but this was middle of the road leftist leadership 16 years ago. it was barely even comment-worthy. so let’s put a flag in the ground there to use for measurement purposes.

“but señor cat, perhaps this is some sort of outlier, and extreme example, sure this cannot be the modal outcome?” one might opine. well, funny thing about that…

here is a young fauxchahantas, have a listen:

“when that much money goes missing it’s usually because somebody broke some laws somewhere, but if we don’t look, if we don’t ask, if we don’t uncover it and make it all public we’ll never find out.”

my goodness, this sounds like, dare i say it, DOGE.

the transition to today’s talking points about “how dare anyone examine the treasury payments systems?” is is pretty astonishing stuff.

is there no end?

apparently not. here’s noted right wing rabble rouser barack obama who even back in 2005 was saying things like “our immigration system is broken” and “we simply cannot allow people to pour into the united states undetected, undocumented, unchecked.”

then he gave this speech in 2007.

we can go all the way back to the halcyon days of 1993 when a young billy clinton stood by al gore in his pre manbearpig days and spoke of a bold new plan called REGO (short for “reinventing government”) that everyone seems to have forgotten about:

“In 1993 President Bill Clinton initiated the National Performance Review appointing a private group to reform federal government eliminating ~100 programs, ~250,000 federal jobs, consolidating ~800 agencies.”

they even wanted to, gasp, “change procurement rules” and “change the personnel rules.”

utter that one today and you’ll be right in the “right wing extremism” bucket.

slap the word DOGE on this and advocate for it, and they’ll throw you right off of “the view” yessirree bob they will.

any of this sound familliar?

i could go on and on, but i suspect you’re getting the point: damn near the whole of the current “progressive left” would refer to its own positions 15-30 years ago, even and especially the ones it pursued when it was in power, as “far right anti-democracy literally worse than nazi occupation threats to fluffy bunnies and to all that is good and right omigod how can you support this assaults on america.”

i’m not sure how one could ask for a clearer or more definitive example of just who moved to where here.

centrist democrats from the 80’s and 90’s now occupy the white house as “republicans” and a great many of their key positions look an awful lot like the positions of the center left from the 90’s, 2000’s, and 2010’s. the policies and priorities have not moved, the parties have.

and it was not the right who moved far right…

when you have lost even the punk icons of the 70’s and 80’s, you’re well and truly lost

this certainly raises whole rafts of questions about just how the left ran so far left and became the defenders of the status quo, opaque, unaccountable government, riotous nation-state scale waste and theft, censorship, political interference, and outright madness and nanny state imposition into everyone’s lives and livelihoods.

it’s probably too much to explore here but i think it really comes down to two basic issues:

1. the post modern performative aggrievement cult DBA “woke” took root and drove the sincere leftists either away or mad in an endless game of “edge lord” where a negative sum power game to stay “most aggrieved” and “most marginal” drove all the worst and dimmest to the top. this was a constant emergent force pushing hard left at accelerating speed and canceling anyone who got in its way. you can get pretty stupid and insane pretty quickly that way once you hit the bad part of the exponential. it destroyed education, business, and politics alike. anything competent or functional got replaced by this: (yes, this is real and yes, this is really the mayor of philadelphia)

2. the left became hideously, ostentatiously, unapologetically corrupt (as ruling parties tend to do). they sold out bigtime and got bigtime rich. you want to know why none of them want to cut waste anymore? because they’re the ones stealing it. ask where they got their astonishing wealth. it sure wasn’t congressional salaries… they sold out to pharma, defense, greentech, china, anyone who was paying. it’s been one vast thieves’ bazaar cum gravy train and the iron law of “where you stand depends upon where you sit” pertains here as everywhere. they want more time in the goody room and will oppose anything that kicks them out.

and let’s be very clear, this is not a problem confined to the left, the rank and file (and leadership) of the gormless opposition party mostly functions as the second piston of the uniparty engine and they all got rich and corrupt too.

the state got big enough to suckle pigs of many parties.

the primary purpose of the US government today is stealing from taxpayers to enrich and entrench an unaccountable aristocracy. it censors speech, interferes in elections, and steals like it’s going out of style.

we used to have centrist agreement that this was a bad thing.

now we have a left wing actively advocating for it and much of a right wing happy to go along to get along so long as they get some goodies too.

i think what’s actually happening is that a sane center of american politics is emerging and that the politicians that live downstream from it have not quite caught up yet.

what’s happening in the white house and DOGE is where the center always was and to whence it is returning. we didn’t change, the leaders did and they took us on one hell of a ride while trying to sell us the “most people actually agree with us” fraud of the last 20 years.

that fell apart. “trust the government” futures are limit down.

the GOP will (hopefully) figure this out and grow dominant (though never underestimate their ability to screw things up) but the left in the US is cooked. they are really well and truly screwed. they have no message, no meaning, no gravitas, not even and sanity.

they will continue to self-own and alienate because they are intellectually and emotionally broken and will need to collapse before they can try to fix themselves.

and oddly, this is one cherelle parker (unwittingly) nailed: