Blurts & Spasms

In answer to Quora question: "What are the weakest positions/arguments held by moderate to liberal Democrats?"

I am still a registered Democrat because I am a political pragmatist and the Democratic party has some of the very few politicians and policy positions I can admire, and I have to be registered to vote in the primaries here in California. At my core, however, I am a libertarian-socialist. That said, some of the arguments/positions I find troubling among liberal Dems include:

1) Political Correctness and its corollaries of cultural sensitivity and aggressive feminism. All of these are predicated on the presumption that anyone in a "position of privilege" in society is obligated to self-oppress in order to compensate for that privilege. In the U.S. it is mainly white males who find themselves at the blunt end of such expectations. Although I do believe in compassionate, empathic understanding of alternative experiences and perspectives, and that power dynamics in a given situation need to be understood and appreciated, personally I think the PC movement created classic codependent "walking on eggshells" behavior that predictably self-defeats in its attempts to engineer cultural change. Why? Because it doesn't authentically empower anyone, it only synthetically and dishonestly disempowers those considered to be in the position of privilege, creating a false vacuum for those who feel disempowered or disenfranchised to fill. But the privileged still hold all the power, as they are the ones conceding it; they are just exercising that power through a kind of condescending permissiveness. Sure, language and attitudes can be violent and oppressive in horrific ways...but self-editing and self-oppression can be just as violent, without having any substantive effect on the power dynamics of a given relationship.

2) The anti-vaccination movement has been a surprise to me. This appears to evidence the kind of herd mentality we usually see more prominently on the conservative end of the political spectrum, and I am frankly bewildered by it. As I think another comment touched upon, the science just doesn't back up the linkage of vaccinations and autism, and the known risks (lower herd immunity) far outweigh the speculated benefits (lower probability of autism spectrum disorders). It is much more likely that upticks in autism statistics are the result of other environmental and genetic factors and increased awareness and diagnosis of autism itself. However a few comments here equate the vaccination paranoia with a desire for GMO labeling, and that is a conflation that simply isn't warranted. There is plentiful data to support limitation on the use of GMOs and the wisdom of informing consumers about the genetic manipulation of their food. Only a few researchers paid by big agriculture have represented GMOs as completely safe...they are just getting a lot of airtime.

3) Blindness to the shortcomings of various candidates. This has always been true across the political spectrum but Dems have tended - until quite recently I think - to be openly critical of their own, something most Republicans seem careful to avoid. This began with Obama and seems to be spilling over onto Hilary Clinton. Both of them have done a number of really awful things, things that contradict their own expressed values and longstanding values of the Democrat political platform, and Dems seem increasingly to be turning a blind eye to those shortcomings. Is this a case of supporting "the lesser evil" in the eyes of voting Democrats in order to win elections? I dunno. But I find it pretty distasteful.
My 2 cents.