[ennui2]

Plant's universe revolves around cognitive dissonance.

cheers!

Amen.

I find politics incredibly tiresome because it's the neverending struggle between people who simply do not think the same way and never will. The right and left are like "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus".

I think the fact that it's a battle neither side can ever "win" makes it feel like a sport to some people, and they revel in it. I just find it exhausting and ultimately a waste of time.

Seriously, I have never witnessed someone saying they changed their mind on a topic being debated. Never.

[onlooker]

Totally agree with everything Ennui just said.

[vtsnowedin]

Well it is just human nature to resist defeat during a contest so you will never see a debater throw up their hands and say I'm wrong you are right so you win.
People do tend to become more conservative as they age. Perhaps it is because they have had to meet their own responsibilities and pay their own bills. While working hard to make your own personal ends meet you lose patience with those that want things handed to them for free and certainly don't want to be taxed so that they can have their way.

[GHung]

ennui said; "Seriously, I have never witnessed someone saying they changed their mind on a topic being debated. Never."

I change my thinking fairly often because I see the point of debate/discussion as being a collective learning exercise. I suppose most egotists see the goal of winning the debate as paramount. Me? If someone presents a valid argument that counters my previous conclusions and presents facts that do so in a convincing way, sticking to "my guns" is idiotic and a waste of everyone's time. Of course, there are certain egotists here who insist on wasting my time, which is why I don't comment here much these days. Can't fix stupid and all that. If the Pantygenets of the world want to waste everyone's time trying to convince others of their 'rightness', it's their time to waste.

[Cog]

Too many people in the world whose life's ambition is to control others. Progressives are notorious for such behavior. A pox on them.

You want to tell me how much soda pop is good for me, which guns offend you and want banned, how much income I can make before you decide its unfair to you, what free speech I can deliver before you call it hate speech and have me arrested or threatened with death, or just plain don't like the way I live my life because it isn't progressive enough for you. My answer is to go *uck yourself.

You want to kill me or imprison me because my life doesn't measure up to your socialist dreams? To borrow a line from a movie, "Skin that smoke wagon and see what happens".

[Plantagenet]

People shift their views and and change their minds all time in science.

Some guy comes along with new data or a new idea and everyone calls B.S. But then someone else does the same experiment in their lab and gets the same results or look through a telescope and make the same measurements or another guy travels to the same rain forest or volcano and sees the same thing, and gradually the new idea is accepted.

Of course there are always some people, even in science, who can't give up their old ideas and accept the new scientific paradigm -------but you just work around them and wait for them to retire.

The same thing is happening in US politics. Old white working class voters can't give up their outmoded ideas so they rally behind Trump. The rest of us just have to work around them and wait for them to retire and leave the scene.

Cheers!

[GHung]

Sure, Cog. It isn't 'Progressives' who want to tell me what I can grow and smoke, tell my daughters what they can and can't do with their bodies, or what science can and can't be taught in our schools. It wasn't 'Progressives' that forbade municipalities in our state from considering climate change and sea level rise in their planning and zoning. Plenty of that sort of thing to go around.

[Cid_Yama]

None of Cog's Strawmen represent the views of Progressives. And because it's not black and white, his binary thinking won't allow him to perceive beyond my side /the other side.

The primary difference between Liberals and Progressives, is that Liberals are Corporatists just like most Republicans. Progressives are Anti-Corporatists. This is one instance where arguments that Liberals and Conservatives are the same, is true.

That doesn't include Progressives. Progressives that are neither right nor left, or perhaps both from the right and left, who see what has been done to our country.

post1306051.html#p1306051


The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn’t Just Her Corporate Cash. It’s Her Corporate Worldview.


There aren’t a lot of certainties left in the US presidential race, but here’s one thing about which we can be absolutely sure: The Clinton camp really doesn’t like talking about fossil-fuel money. Last week, when a young Greenpeace campaigner challenged Hillary Clinton about taking money from fossil-fuel companies, the candidate accused the Bernie Sanders campaign of “lying” and declared herself “so sick” of it. As the exchange went viral, a succession of high-powered Clinton supporters pronounced that there was nothing to see here and that everyone should move along.

The very suggestion that taking this money could impact Clinton’s actions is “baseless and should stop,” according to California Senator Barbara Boxer. It’s “flat-out false,” “inappropriate,” and doesn’t “hold water,” declared New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to issue “guidelines for good and bad behavior” for the Sanders camp. The first guideline? Cut out the “innuendo suggesting, without evidence, that Clinton is corrupt.”

That’s a whole lot of firepower to slap down a non-issue. So is it an issue or not?

First, some facts. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including her Super PAC, has received a lot of money from the employees and registered lobbyists of fossil-fuel companies. There’s the much-cited $4.5 million that Greenpeace calculated, which includes bundling by lobbyists.

But that’s not all. There is also a lot more money from sources not included in those calculations. For instance, one of Clinton’s most prominent and active financial backers is Warren Buffett. While he owns a large mix of assets, Buffett is up to his eyeballs in coal, including coal transportation and some of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country.

Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years, Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron have all contributed to the foundation. An investigation in the International Business Times just revealed that at least two of these oil companies were part of an effort to lobby Clinton’s State Department about the Alberta tar sands, a massive deposit of extra-dirty oil. Leading climate scientists like James Hansen have explained that if we don’t keep the vast majority of that carbon in the ground, we will unleash catastrophic levels of warming.

During this period, the investigation found, Clinton’s State Department approved the Alberta Clipper, a controversial pipeline carrying large amounts of tar-sands bitumen from Alberta to Wisconsin. “According to federal lobbying records reviewed by the IBT,” write David Sirota and Ned Resnikoff, “Chevron and ConocoPhillips both lobbied the State Department specifically on the issue of ‘oil sands’ in the immediate months prior to the department’s approval, as did a trade association funded by ExxonMobil.”

Did the donations to the Clinton Foundation have anything to do with the State Department’s pipeline decision? Did they make Hillary Clinton more disposed to seeing tar-sands pipelines as environmentally benign, as early State Department reviews of Keystone XL seemed to conclude, despite the many scientific warnings? There is no proof—no “smoking gun,” as Clinton defenders like to say. Just as there is no proof that the money her campaign took from gas lobbyists and fracking financiers has shaped Clinton’s current (and dangerous) view that fracking can be made safe.

We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.

To take just one example, an article in Mother Jones based on the WikiLeaks cables reveals what happened when fracking came to Bulgaria. In 2011, the country signed a $68 million deal with Chevron, granting the company millions of acres in shale-gas concessions. The Bulgarian public wasn’t happy: Tens of thousands were in the streets of Sofia with banners reading Stop Fracking With Our Water. But when Clinton came for a state visit in 2012, she sided with Chevron (one of whose executives had bundled large sums for her presidential campaign in 2008). In fact, the leaked cables show that the main topic of her meetings with Bulgaria’s leaders was fracking. Clinton offered to fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people,” and she dispatched her Eurasian energy envoy, Richard Morningstar, to lobby hard against a fracking ban in neighboring Romania. Eventually, they won those battles—and today, the State Department provides “assistance” with fracking to dozens of countries around the world, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has called for a moratorium on new fracking. But Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.

While Clinton is great at warring with Republicans, taking on powerful corporations goes against her entire worldview, against everything she’s built, and everything she stands for. The real issue, in other words, isn’t Clinton’s corporate cash, it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology: one that makes taking money from lobbyists and accepting exorbitant speech fees from banks seem so natural that the candidate is openly struggling to see why any of this has blown up at all.

To understand this worldview, one need look no further than the foundation at which Hillary Clinton works and which bears her family name. The mission of the Clinton Foundation can be distilled as follows: There is so much private wealth sloshing around our planet (thanks in very large part to the deregulation and privatization frenzy that Bill Clinton unleashed on the world while president), that every single problem on earth, no matter how large, can be solved by convincing the ultra-rich to do the right things with their loose change. Naturally, the people to convince them to do these fine things are the Clintons, the ultimate relationship brokers and dealmakers, with the help of an entourage of A-list celebrities.

So let’s forget the smoking guns for the moment. The problem with Clinton World is structural. It’s the way in which these profoundly enmeshed relationships—lubricated by the exchange of money, favors, status, and media attention—shape what gets proposed as policy in the first place.

For instance, under the Clintons’ guidance, drug companies work with the foundation to knock down their prices in Africa (conveniently avoiding the real solution: changing the system of patenting that allows them to charge such grotesque prices to the poor in the first place). The Dow Chemical Company finances water projects in India (just don’t mention their connection to the ongoing human health disaster in Bhopal, for which the company still refuses to take responsibility). And it was at the Clinton Global Initiative that airline mogul Richard Branson made his flashy pledge to spend billions solving climate change (almost a decade later, we’re still waiting, while Virgin Airlines keeps expanding).

In Clinton World it’s always win-win-win: The governments look effective, the corporations look righteous, and the celebrities look serious. Oh, and another win too: The Clintons grow ever more powerful.

At the center of it all is the canonical belief that change comes not by confronting the wealthy and powerful but by partnering with them. Viewed from within the logic of what Thomas Frank recently termed “the land of money,” all of Hillary Clinton’s most controversial actions make sense. Why not take money from fossil-fuel lobbyists? Why not get paid hundreds of thousands for speeches to Goldman Sachs? It’s not a conflict of interest; it’s a mutually beneficial partnership—part of a never-ending merry-go-round of corporate-political give and take.

Sanders and his supporters understand something critical: It won’t all be win-win. For any of this to happen, fossil-fuel companies, which have made obscene profits for many decades, will have to start losing. And losing more than just the tax breaks and subsidies that Clinton is promising to cut. They will also have to lose the new drilling and mining leases they want; they’ll have to be denied permits for the pipelines and export terminals they very much want to build. They will have to leave trillions of dollars’ worth of proven fossil-fuel reserves in the ground.

Meanwhile, if solar panels proliferate on rooftops, big power utilities will lose a significant portion of their profits, since their former customers will be in the energy-generation business. This would create opportunities for a more level economy and, ultimately, for lower utility bills—but once again, some powerful interests will have to lose (which is why Warren Buffett’s coal-fired utility in Nevada has gone to war against solar).

A president willing to inflict these losses on fossil-fuel companies and their allies needs to be more than just not actively corrupt. That president needs to be up for the fight of the century—and absolutely clear about which side must win. Looking at the Democratic primary, there can be no doubt about who is best suited to rise to this historic moment.

The good news? He just won Wisconsin. And he isn’t following anyone’s guidelines for good behavior.

link


This is the same problem Progressives have with Obama. When Obama was campaigning for the Presidency, he pretended to be a Progressive, an Anti-Corporatist. But as soon as he entered office, he put on his Pro-Corporate hat. That's why none of the Corporate sacred cows have been challenged during his tenure. In fact he benefited them and entrenched them more deeply.

What the Establishment wants is Corporatist vs Corporatist in Presidential Elections. Bernie is the only alternative to that.

[Cog]

It is not the role of government to decide winners and losers. It is to create a legal and regulatory environment in which all can compete with their ideas and products. That would be its constitutional role.

[Cid_Yama]

That is a Pro-Corporate, dare I say, Liberal point of view. (Since Conservative Pro-Corporatists want no regulation at all.)

Progressives see it differently. In the words of Progressive President FDR,

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

[Plantagenet]

This is the same problem Progressives have with Obama. When Obama was campaigning for the Presidency, he pretended to be a Progressive, an Anti-Corporatist. But as soon as he entered office, he put on his Pro-Corporate hat. That's why none of the Corporate sacred cows have been challenged during his tenure. In fact he benefited them and entrenched them more deeply.

What the Establishment wants is Corporatist vs Corporatist in Presidential Elections. Bernie is the only alternative to that.

Yup.

Hillary is promising to be even more Pro-Corporate then Obama, and she's already doing it in her campaign fund raising. In 2008 Obama smashed the Campaign Finance Law by turning down public money and taking obscene amounts of Wall Street and corporate money to finance his presidential run. Now Hillary is on track to raise and over TWO BILLION dollars for her presidential campaign, mostly from corporations and Big Bank and Wall Street and wealthy people-----a truly truly obscene amount of fundraising and spending.

hillary-clinton-fundraising-goal-2-billion

Cheers!

[Cid_Yama]

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government.

That is why Pro-Corporatists want a weak, practically non-existent Government (or one that is corrupt and turned to their own purposes). They know that the power of a strong organized government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is the only thing that can stand against them.

[Fishman]

Best "progressive" Bernie event of the election, Bernie being chased off his own stage by BLM women literally jumping up and down screaming "we are being rational!!"
Cid, progressivism is dying as the reality of limited resources, debt,and the abject failure of the Obama years bears down on us. The folks supporting Bernie have less understanding of reality than the worst schizophrenic going through a psychotic break

[Cid_Yama]

Blah, Blah, Blah.

As long as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence live on in the hearts of people, our Democracy is not dead. We CAN win back our government and our liberty from those that would enslave us.

Their main weakness is there are far more of us, than there are of them. Their power requires acquiescence and complacency. They require our cooperation in our own enslavement.

And of course your characterization of the event is total nonsense.


BLM Activist Who Shut Down Sanders is Radical Christian, Sarah Palin Supporter

One of the Black Lives Matter activists who shut down the Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle is a self-identified “radical Christian” and former Sarah Palin supporter.

Marissa Jenae Johnson along with another protester, Mara Jacqueline, interrupted the planned Seattle rally for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday afternoon, preventing the Vermont senator from addressing the massive crowd.

The rally at Westlake Park ended around 3 p.m. with Sanders choosing to leave after the belligerent protesters took the stage and stayed there, controlling the microphone, and hurling racist insults at the progressive crowd gathered to hear Sanders speak.

After disrupting the Sanders’ event and taking the microphone, a hostile and obnoxious Johnson accused the audience of “white supremacist liberalism” before telling the Seattle crowd:

I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is — with all of its progressives — but you’ve already done that for me. Thank you.

Apparently Johnson is unaware that Bernie Sanders was marching with Martin Luther King Jr. before she was even born.

Clearly Johnson is a poor student of history and politics. The fact is that of all the current presidential candidates Sanders is probably the most sympathetic to the concerns expressed by the BLM movement.

However, perhaps even more damning, on her Facebook page, Johnson admits that she was a Sarah Palin supporter. This fact, the fact that she once supported Sarah Palin, is in itself indicative of poor judgment and faulty character, and provides a larger context for her more recent moral failure.

link


Since then, BLM has disowned the TWO women, claiming they do not represent the movement, and apologized to Bernie Sanders.

They were right-wing nut jobs, and reminiscent of the Breitbart stunts of the past.

[onlooker]

Blah, Blah, Blah.

As long as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence live on in the hearts of people, our Democracy is not dead. We CAN win back our government and our liberty from those that would enslave us.

Their main weakness is there are far more of us, than there are of them. Their power requires acquiescence and complacency. They require our cooperation in our own enslavement.

I agree, no matter what is happening with the environment or the planet in general, every day is important to us all living right now on it. I am with Cid in simply aspiring for the ideal that mankind can live with each other in relative harmony and not constant warfare or exploitation. We have reached this impasse and it is time for ALL humanity to unite under the banner of we wish to have a future and we wish that future to be one of righteousness whereby "All men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" Maybe all is lost but at least we can as Cid stated go away with some measure of redemption. Maybe all is not lost also.

[Cid_Yama]

More on the stunt that disrupted the Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle.

The Real Black Lives Matter Wants Activists To Publicly Apologize to Bernie Sanders
Women traced to Radical right-wing group

Black Lives Matter wants the two women who shut down a Bernie Sanders event in Seattle on Saturday to publicly apologize to the Senator and Presidential Candidate.

Jason Easley wrote about Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford shutting down Bernie Sanders’ rally in Seattle.

They led organizers and the media to believe they are part of Black Lives Matter. It’s not hard to understand why. BLM is succeeding in its efforts to raise awareness and get action on the multitude of issues that are a direct consequence of structural racism. The Black Lives Matter movement is very loosely structured without a central organization. That provides freedom to activists and supporters, but it means that BLM is also vulnerable to groups who may wish to co-opt their national reputation, as occurred on Saturday.

The group that Johnson and Willaford associate with has a very different approach and agenda.

The group is called Outside Agitators 206. Simply put, OA 206 wants to take the state apart and put it back together again as they want it.

OA is not on the list of endorsing organizations on the Black Lives Matter website.

In June, Outside Agitators 206 made its impression of the Black Lives Matter movement – and for that matter the Democratic Party when it reposted an article called Democrats Hope to Bury Black Lives Matter Under Election Blitz from a site called The Black Agenda Report.

According to the site, Glen Ford is its executive editor. From the very beginning of the article, Ford makes his views about the Black Lives Matter organization and the Democratic Party crystal clear.

The Democrats hope the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, will disappear amid the hype of the coming election season. “The Democrats have mounted a systematic cooption-repression response that will intensify as the election season – and Black cities – heat up.” The Democrats understand that, for the movement to succeed, their party’s power over Black America must be broken.

In short, OA anticipates the demise of BLM, It has declared war on the Democratic Party and, in Ford’s words, “the NAACP, the Urban League, most Black local churches and labor organizations, fraternities and sororities, not to mention Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-Push Coalition and “King Rat” Al Sharpton’s National Action Network – are annexes of the Democratic Party.”

I leave it to you to draw whatever conclusions you wish about Ford and OA 206’s silence when it come to the Republican Party, it’s policies and organizations.

It’s clear that contrary to Ford’s pronouncements about Black Lives Matter, it is succeeding. So much so that OA 206 activists tried to co-opt its name and national reputation to further its own agenda.

Johnson and Willaford owe Bernie Sanders a public apology, but they also owe one to Black Lives Matter, its activists and supporters.

link

In other words, these women belong to a group of right-wing agitators attempting destroy the reputation of the Black Lives Matter movement and incite a war between Democrats and Blacks.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Seriously, I have never witnessed someone saying they changed their mind on a topic being debated. Never.

What do you mean? In an hour or two while a debate takes place? Or over the course of decades as the person matures, learns, watches politics in action (or inaction), reflects, and then makes (more) reasoned choices than when they were young and very inexperienced?

In my early 20's I was a Republican. I was proud and happy to vote for Reagan in the first election I was old enough to vote in. I thought of him like a Philospher King compared to most of the popular politicians in his day.

Three plus decades later, I am solidly libertarian, and far more liberal than conservative when it comes to most social issues. Having a brain, the ability to do arithmetic, and being willing to look at one issue at a time vs. joining one of the "big groups", I have tended to stay conservative as far as financial issues, and straddle the fence as far as regulation.

I don't claim any of this is especially good or bad, but certainly different on many issues than 35-ish years ago.

What I find amusing is that generally if I post an opinion on a single political issue, the vast majority of posters responding on a site like, say, Bloomberg assume I am a conservative or liberal, based on my comments/opinions about that single issue. Even if I mention ideas that go against the grain of both the far left and far right.

So your point about people acting like it's a competitive sport is well taken.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Too many people in the world whose life's ambition is to control others. Progressives are notorious for such behavior. A pox on them.

Geez Cog. As someone somewhere in the middle, it just kills me how BOTH sides (especially the extremes) repeatedly state this about only the OTHER side (of course).

I agree with you that liberals and progressives generally want to control peoples' pocketbooks. They claim it's for "justice" but it's obviously true.

OTOH, conservatives generally want to control social behavior. If you try to say no, a few words for you: abortion, gays, and Jesus. They try to claim it's for some moral reason, but it's obviously true that there is a lot of hating going on re such folks/issues by conservatives.

Either side pretending that such behavior (trying to control others) is ONLY practiced by the other side is delusional to the point it COMPLETELY lacks credibility.

[Sixstrings]

This battle between Clinton and Sanders is highlighting the differences between Liberals and Progressives and shows how there CAN be Progressive Republicans as there were in Eisenhower's time.

Historically, Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive *Republican* response, to rising popularity of *socialists*, in the early 1900s. The US was in a guilded age back then, and JP Morgan and Vanderbilt and the Rockefellers and Wall Street and Standard Oil -- all the robber barons -- had a grip on the nation, and the presidency was like a ceremonial thing.

It was the tycoons that had the power, and they picked the presidential candidates.

They all hated Roosevelt, he got to power via a circuitous route -- the tycoons made him VICE president, their plan being to PREVENT him from running for president. But then the president passed away.. (was it mckinley?).. and Teddy became president after all.

So anyhow..

That's what we need again certainly, another Roosevelt, I don't care if it's a Franklin or a Teddy. I'd be fine with the latter.

CID --

Which Republicans are you hopeful about? Your post sounds as if progressive Republicans are on the rise but alas, I don't see it.

Kasich's no progressive. He gives people hugs in these rallies and he tells folksy stories about caring about folk, but if you dig a bit deeper -- he wants to cut social security and raise the age. It's all the same stuff. Maybe he's a bit left of Paul Ryan, okay, but still that ain't a progressive.

And Clinton's not really a progressive either.

If Bernie doesn't get the nomination, it may just be time for Progressives to reach across the aisle and come together for and independent run. It looks like people on both sides are getting the message, and we would be free to dump both the Liberal and Conservative baggage and be able to forge a new way.

Are you with me?

Sure I'm with ya, but who's the candidate?

P.S. -- I'm progressive as far as reasonable consumer protection, and workers' rights, and the income disparity issue. But I also understand the other side of the coin, capitalism and business. Personally I wouldn't want it to go too far over into super far left.

Bernie Sanders' positions are all fine with me, except the gun issue lately he shouldn't have shifted on. Not in that way, going the tort law route (Clinton pushed him to this). I liked how Bernie was before, on the Left but also a civil libertarian. That would be his old guns position, and more importantly, things like net neutrality, domestic spying, privacy issues and privacy protections versus corporations etc.

2nd P.S. -- Another historical note.. after the defeat of Hooverism and the election of FDR, his Republican presidential opponents did shift a bit finally, from standard conservatism.

In one of his re-election campaign speeches, FDR famously said something like, "suddenly all these Republicans are saying they love Social Security, they love all these New Deal things, and they say they can do them even BETTER and do more of them, and not even tax anyone for it."

[Sixstrings]

IMHO someone who collected taxes and then used them wisely like one of the good Caesars like Emperors Claudius and Marcus Aurelius or maybe Byzantine Emperor Justinian would be a better image for progressives than Robin Hood, who is a more of an anti-government and anti-tax activist.

I like Roman history, it's a good parallel to the modern world.

The "Senate and People, of Rome." That meant, the rich elite -- the 1% -- but also the PEOPLE, too.

Rome had troubles when things were TOO shifted toward the patricians -- the Senate part of that "senate and people" equation.

Things went along well, as long as it was the senate AND the people.

Senatus Populusque Romanus ("The Roman Senate and People")