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Technically Catholic's avatar

Hi Tomas, nicely written as always - with excellent graphics to illustrate your points.

However, I think it is worth bearing in mind that to call leftist parties "Progressive" is the second best branding strategy in political history. The best branding was for the Russian Bolsheviks (majority).

To make progress is to make change that people will come to see as positive. And perhaps when you look across countries and for a long time you can make a good case for "Progressive" parties making "progress" at least when taken as an aggregate. However, there are problems on the horizon just now.

Crime is at an all-time low - as an aggregate. However, it has seen a severe uptick in the last three years in numerous large American cities. Bari Weiss's podcast, Honestly, has an excellent, nuanced discussion of the intertwining issues. Taking account these intricacies most people would say that progressives tried some new things based on poor understanding and made life very dangerous for small parts of big cities. It is so dangerous in these places that the overall trend lines have changed direction.

Progressives have also decided that homelessness is largely a choice and that cities should accommodate the homeless rather than take measures to get them off the street. Now many cities have become dangerous due to lawless homeless encampments. Again referring to a Bari Weiss project, see this morning's post by Leighton Woodhouse on Common Sense. Many people who support Progressive parties have great compassion for "the least of these," which includes compassion for the soaring number of people dying of drug overdoses in urban homeless encampments where there is not only a lack of drug law enforcement, there is often municipal government material support for drug use.

So, I think there will be ebbs and flows. Perhaps the net effect of this will be a movement towards changing things - and, fair enough, no system is perfect and it makes sense to try to fix known flaws. However, it makes more sense to try out proposed changes slowly, carefully and with careful evaluation of their effects before there is wide implementation - including determining if positive effects came from the change or from the highly motivated team that executed the pilot project.

"Progressive" politicians have a long history of implementing their "good ideas," such as, say, communism, without any real-world evaluation. In the case of communism we may never know (within 100 million) how many people died from that effort.

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Agustin Mauro's avatar

Nice text! I kind of had the idea in mind but giving it a name an data makes it a lot more concrete.

I have a doubt left. If there are countries where 80/90 percent of the population is in cities then right wings and conservatives shouldn't be a big contender with only 10/20 percent of the population (you would still have the correlation). In other words, if cities produce progressivism (whatever that is) then there is an explanation lacking for why a big percentage of the population in cities is still conservative

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