for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate' and 'progressive' parties represent? And where are they on the republican democrat spectrum?
Progressive is Left. Their pet terrorist loot the school, the Target, or the Walmart.
Despite what the article says, we have no moderates.
Conservative is right. Their pet terrorists take guns and shoot up the school, the Target, or the Walmart. (And occasionally, a church here or there).
That's US politics in a nutshell.
It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so.
In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not.
Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right.
Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.
The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers.
But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...
If you have a few minutes of thought to the ~200 countries that 8 billion people are living under, like China, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Poland, Phillipines, Turkey, and their policies on immigration, LGBT, drug use, freedom of speech/press, you would quickly be disabused of any idea the US democrats are center-right.
What I think is that steeped in a Western European leftist bubble, 95% of the world is right wing to you, and you’re confused on where America stands in that spectrum, forgetting about who’s currently been elected in the rest of Europe like Sweden, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, etc.
Progressives believe that allowing developers to build housing will only create "luxury" housing that is unaffordable to all but the rich, increasing gentrification and displacement. Therefore it's necessary to mandate things like "inclusionary zoning" and tight review of every single development project.
Empirically, the progressive stance results in a lot less housing of any sort getting built, whether "affordable" or otherwise, and consequently higher housing prices for all but the lucky lottery winners who grab the limited number of BMR ("Below Market Rent") units. Some would say that that's actually the goal of progressives (ie, they're using "progressive" window dressing to preserve property values/neighborhood aesthetics of the very rich).
Economically or socially and over what sort of time scale?
Liberty is a function of an extraordinarily strong social contract. If you don't have strong enforcement of rights, you don't have rights.
As for social policy, it is heading to the right, gaining momentum in the years leading to Trump and making steady gains since. I would characterize the social overton window in the US as the Democrats nailing the left end of the window the wall and Republicans systemically dragging the right end further and further right.
This requires a much longer thesis. In short, war throughout history is quite a centrist position (since it's been waged extensively by both left and rightists). Right now you have the Democrats advocating for defense of a nation against invasion, and a leftist government (Venezuela) advocating for the invasion and annexation of Guyana. When leftist governments aren't advocating for industrial military (USSR), global armed revolution and killing, it's usually said through the privilege and zero-skin-in-the-game safety of being under the US' defensive shield, or it's Pol Pot.
> Democrats is to preserve the status quo in all matters: social
Quite humorous to most global onlookers, I'm sure, as most would not be fond of some Democrats' constant push for "social justice."
> don't forget about Europe when establishing your list of countries to define a global overton window
Europe is 9.3% of the world. Half of which wouldn't agree with you since there are still many right wing governments in Europe and 41% of France voted for Le Pen.
So again, I'd recommend you'd be more accurate in relating the US to whichever country you're in, instead of making statements on the positions of people around the globe in which you seem naive on their governments and history.
It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.
The Overton window mainly classifies the kind of ideas that are "politically acceptable" on the stage for which it's defined, using terms ranging from "unthinkable" to "radical" to "popular" to "policy". On the world stage, I would argue that the most left-leaning of European countries define the left end of the window (given that they have enacted left policies), and the most right-leaning countries (e.g. Singapore) define the right end of the window. It's not a matter of proportion.
That said, I agree that the global window is rapidly shifting right, as in your example of France.
Okay, point-by-point:
> Military
I agree that the military does not neatly fit into a spectrum which applies well on the global window of left/right. Reaching instead for political philosophy rather than political practice, I think it's better to introduce the 2-dimensional political compass to understand this rather than relying on the 1-dimensional left/right spectrum: war is more favored by authoritarian politics (which is to say politics that value authority, rather than necessarily repressive regimes, which are totalitarian). I would also say that authoritarianism tends to be more popular on the right, though the Soviet Union offers a clear counter-example. This issue is messy indeed. But, generally speaking, I think that American leftists (as a distinct group from liberals or Democrats) are not in favor of war, whereas everyone right of and including Democrats are generally pro-military and weakly or strongly in favor of American imperialism.
> Social justice
"Social justice" is ill-defined here, and I don't really think Democrats push for it. A positive "social justice", as I understand it, might, for instance, consider reparations, which I don't think any contemporary Democrats have pushed for. Democrats adopt a more equality-oriented (not equity-oriented, which I would argue is more aligned with what "social justice" calls for) approach to social issues, outside of certain matters like ostensible support for affirmative action.
But, I don't think this is the thread to define and argue over whatever "social justice" means. You can send me an email if you want to clear that up.
I think you offered charity to the point of being misleading. There is only one side who wants to make housing more affordable. The charitable view of progressive policy making is that they reject any demand for San Francisco to be a commercial center and want to preserve the lifestyle, built environment, and composition of residents to what it was in the 80s.
20 years ago, progs would admit outright that they thought new development was undesirable. Since, it has become more inappropriate to say that out loud so they dress it in concerns about only supporting housing under economically infeasible conditions.
Folks interested can read what CCHO said about SB35 here: https://www.sfccho.org/in-the-news/2018/10/13/opinion-alarmi...
The crux of their concern/prediction is:
> As currently written, the practical outcome of SB 35 will be to further expedite and accelerate market-rate approvals in the small handful of California communities where the real estate market is already hot – communities that are overwhelmingly urban, low-income, and predominantly people of color. These are the same communities that are currently grappling with displacement and gentrification, and typically have terrible imbalances of market-rate housing development compared to affordable housing. Simply accelerating approvals in those communities is just a recipe to spur even more aggressive gentrification.
I personally think folks like the CCHO are taking a misguided policy approach to solving/ameliorating the problems they worry about, and sometimes behave disingenuously (and should be called out, with specific details, when they do so). But that doesn't make their concerns illegitimate.
Here's an example of an earlier direct reply by Wiener to CCHO about the bill: http://www.beyondchron.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Senato...
> This housing crisis will never be solved without a solution that includes a significantly increased supply of all types of housing, at all income levels, in every community throughout California, both subsidized and non-subsidized. The devastating eviction crisis and rapid displacement of low- and middle-income people from cities results, in large part, from failing to build enough housing for the past half century. SB 35 empowers the state to take action and ensure that every single community is approving its fair share of housing – especially those communities currently punting their housing needs to neighboring jurisdictions.
Here is Calvin Welch, friends with Marti and Cohen and housing guru to Sup. Preston, saying Home S.F., a gentler streamlining measure vs. SB35, was ethnic cleansing: https://missionlocal.org/2016/01/sf-delays-controversial-hou....
I’ll keep looking for the other statement I had in mind.
Calling these proposals "ethnic cleansing" is ridiculous hyperbole. Not as stupid as a death-threat song lyric tweet, but definitely unhelpful. Welch was rightly called out for that one.
It's true that affordability isn't poured into concrete, but it is baked into each and every real estate transaction.
A new luxury high rise needs to have x number of affordable units by law. As you point out, it's true that they don't build the affordable units much or any different than their other units.
But, the way the whole financial side of the thing is structured is completely different than it would be if the laws were different.
A home is just as much a mortgage as it is a physical object.
Is Singapore really among "the most right-leaning countries"?
In 2022, Singapore decriminalised male-male sex. In over 60 countries worldwide it is still a crime, and in over 10 of those it has the death penalty (at least in theory).
While it has been criticised on religious freedom (for banning certain controversial groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas and the Unification Church) – it still is greatly ahead in this area of countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. The government is officially neutral between the major religions, and there is no capital punishment for essentially religious offences such as apostasy, blasphemy, or heresy.
Economically, Singapore deviates in a number of ways from right-wing economic orthodoxy – state-owned enterprises play a major role in its economy, close to 80% of its population lives in government-owned public housing, the government runs a universal public health system.
For context, I'm not white, not American, not christian so I guess I have a different pov, but to me Europe was much much more socially to the right than the US. Maybe it's different when you are white in Europe though :)