View from Australia: Sanders is a 'normal left-leaning' Politician

[n2doc]

By James Baker;
The new Republican Party has turned so far hard right, that Bernie Sanders may now be considered an Eisenhower Republican.

This question was raised on a political blog. We seldom hear from other countries about our politics, and, when we do, we pay no attention, or, we make snide remarks because we believe they are meddling.

One response from a young woman from Australia caught my attention:

“I am an Australian (in Australia) and we are all following Bernie here. He is just a normal left leaning politician here - nothing radical about him at all.

The rest of your Democratic candidates we would consider Republicans here. (Hillary would not be permitted to continue as a politician here - voter protest would have ended her career years ago.)

Unfortunately, your Republicans are so far gone, that they resemble fascists. My father is an 87-year-old Polish refugee from the Holocaust, and he says to me all the time that your republicans are repeating the sins of Nazi pre-war Germany.

I can understand why you are “fed-up Republicans,” because we too, are fed-up with them, and we cannot believe how recklessly they have destroyed your country.”

more
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/indian-hill/2015/11/11/column-bernie-sanders-eisenhower-republican/74733500/

[LiberalArkie]

1. Great OP

[Cleita]

2. Yes, Bernie would have been to the right of most Democrats back in 1961 when I was first able to

vote. As for them resembling fascists, I remember back in the early days of DU and the first term of pResident GWB of posters on DU saying the same thing about their relatives who had survived the Nazis. It was then that I picked up William Shirer's book, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" off my bookshelf and reread it. I had acquired it the middle sixties, the first time it was published. The first time I read it, there were few comparisons to the present government we had at the time under Kennedy and LBJ. The second reading in 2003 hit me like a ton of bricks what was happening under the Bush administration and what is still happening today from the media being co-opted by one party to present only their POV and propaganda all the way to the sanctioning of torture in war, in wars of aggression or pre-emptive war, of off shore prisons and the cozy marriage of government and industry like we have today.

The big difference is that the Nazis never cheated on elections. They just scared the opposition into not voting. We do allow the Republicans to cheat on elections and boldly to do so. Apparently, the present day elections in Kentucky are rousing a lot of suspicions.

[DetlefK]

3. Dito in Germany.

Just to give some recent national poll-numbers of the various political parties in Germany:

http://www.infratest-dimap.de/

Left (far-left) - 9%
Social Democrats (center-left) - 24%
Greens (eco, centrist to center-left, liberal) - 11%
Christian Democratic Union (centrist to center-right, conservative) - 37%
Free Democrats (capitalist, center-right, liberal) - 5%
Alternative for Germany (center-right to far-right) - 8%
Others - 6%

That's 44% for political parties stretching from moderate left to far left.
And 16% for parties for whom liberalism is a core-issue in their party-platforms.

And as there is no winner-takes-all in Germany, the german parliament typically consists of 4-5 parties, making sure everyone gets heard.
In fact, Germany has so many parties, that we need a 5%-threshold to keep the smallest parties out.

[Enthusiast]

4. Kicked and recommended a whole bunch!

[dae]

5. Thx n2doc. It's always interesting to see how our country is viewed from afar.