Canada

I am not far left enough to say communism is the right goal, yet, but I am further left than saying we need socialist reforms. I am from Saskatchewan so I can see the benefits of psuedo-socialized markets (think phone and internet with Sasktel sticking it to the big 3) I just wish the rest of the province could see it to. If Saskatchewan can see it and really start celebrating it maybe the rest of Canada could as well.

Exactly this! A great example is when the Alberta UCP flat out told renewable energy companies that they just were not allowed to do business in Alberta. Straight up, in your face central planning. Free market indeed...

I'm 100% behind you with this.

And every time I mentioned how it was a bad idea to vote for Carney and how bad he is, I kept being downvoted and then people comment "yeah but we would've has Poilievre otherwise."

No we wouldn't. A lot of NDP ridings turned red because of this. But people should have voted for the NDP. With them as a strong opposition, we would still be in a better position in a minority big C Conservative government than we are right now with a majority small c conservative government.

Carney is a corporatist. He knows how to sweet talk investors to gain their trust like any CEO can bullshit people into buying their stock. And he's done that with all of Canada.

This this this. So much this. Canadians do not understand just how catastrophic of a fuckup that was. The consequences of that have not yet been truly felt but it will be horrendous when they are. Canada's electoral system is a goddamn joke and, in my opinion, is barely even a democracy at all because of it.

Just like the US, we are one 51% vote away from a bad actor gaining absolute power and tearing down everything Canadians have known and loved. Hell, even right now we have a majority government that the people did not vote for.

Yeah he might've fucked the whole country on that one, but now he's exclusive with Katy Perry so I guess he learned his lesson. /s

The polarization is a product, a symptom, not a cause. Look at the economic processes affecting everyone. They drive the political processes, part of which is polarization. Simple example - if I can't find a job as a young guy, see no feasible way to move out of my parents' basement, therefore have little chance to court a girl and have a family of my own, I'd be pretty angry and looking for the cause of my misery. Seeing all these new people on the street that weren't here a few years ago would be an obvious candidate. The axes on which polarizarion occurs aren't new and unnatural, and people have found the same explanations for their misery in the past, way in the past. Not all of those explanations are valid of course, but the economic misery driving to them is real and the march towards polarization won't stop until the misery recedes.

Not a new thing even remotely. That isn't the "single factor," these are the inevitable conditions that liberal-capitalist systems produce. They are fundamentally organized around the subordination of othered groups of people to the benefit of a privileged group(s), which means the value of human life or any life is not a real consideration. Polarization like this appeared in the late nineteenth century as well (Progressives and Populists), and similarly people looked at that as the cause of problems and not the result of a system that will never adopt an idealized form of democracy as that would inevitably mean a group of exploited people have power within that system.

What you are identifying is a particularly energetic moment in political rhetoric that has been very effectively proliferated through corporatized media (not just social but yes, social media) and internet services. To suggest there are "two camps" depends on erasing the variability of people's material and social interests in politics, which just works to the benefit of privileged groups and their political interests. I'd hardly call Liberal voters the same thing as NDP voters or, god forbid, someone who understands the liberal legal and political system as only a part of our politics and not the entirety of it. The split I figure you're thinking about is between Liberals and Cons (which can be understood as "liberals and conservatives," "progressive and traditional," "fascists and republicans," but is really just oriented around party politics and not actual ideological differences) and, go figure, they happen to be ideologically aligned under neoliberalism. Their differences are a consequence of different marketing and rhetoric strategies based on target demographics and regions.

Cons do better in the counties with mostly white settlers who have poor political literacy, a lack of cultural diversity, and a high economic dependency on extractive industry and agriculture. So, they use rhetoric that enforces "traditional" values and relies on an elitist crisis narrative that constructs local economic decline or struggle as a consequence of decadent wealthy people in positions of power who have corrupted the country, i.e. the only other large party: Liberals. Liberals tend to do better in cities and suburbs, particularly affluent ones, and use rhetoric that evokes welfare liberal ideas of "progress" and a balance between private and public spending to address a crisis in market forces and bad actors within the system, namely Conservatives. They must produce certain outcomes to maintain that image, and of course their different interests means they attract different financial supporters with their own imperatives that factor into policy-making. So, they sometimes push different policies, but usually their motivations and outcomes are ideologically compatible.

The result is the construction of this adverserial narrative that really just refers to what the most privileged groups associated with voting trends in each party are concerned about. Fascists are particularly energetic, and both parties here in Canada have readily embraced that energy to their ends. PP pushes transphobia and racism, Carney plays on the anxiety caused by it to frame the same neoliberal policies as acts of self-reliance and sovereignty. To even suggest this system was democratic to begin with is also deeply ahistorical and difficult to defend rationally. You could certainly say there's "two teams" in that there really is just capitalism and its supporters and then people who are invested in the value of human life, but then the politics just melts into one team which is "capitalism's supporters." I'm sure you can understand how that would be reductive as well.

Please, do not buy into narratives that simply these issues; simplicity is easier for them to control.

While you are correct, I kinda hate this argument because it ascribes equal blame on both sides as if giving up on human rights is a reasonable political position. The better way to describe it is that the Nazis are comfortable taking their masks off