I thought ditching the word "socialism" was the most honest thing the NDP has done in 25 years. It isn't a socialist party, clearly.
Rokossovsky, I think I would invert your choices of when to apply pragmatism, in your above two posts.
Monbiot's reasoning for opposing the phaseout of nuclear recently is because the majority of the slack in practice gets taken up by fossil fuels rather than renwables. Thus the urgent need to avoid hitting climate change tipping points trumps the longer-term need to deal with waste-disposal...choosing a lesser evil.
However, when it comes to the promotion of a collective versus individualist society, the same does not hold. In the name of pursuing centrism as an electoral strategy over the past couple of decades, we're getting caught in a perpetual shift to the right of political discourse and the media landscape. The end result? The Liberals of the '70s were positively radical compared to the Mulcair NDP. Mulcair opposes paying for social investments through increased taxation, is for pipelines if they are horizontal, and no longer speaks about supporting the poor - it's the middle class that matters to him (and Trudeau...and Harper...). But everyone saw what happened to Olivia Chow's seat tonight. So what good does abandoning principle really do in such matters?
I don't think it does much. The ideological backdrop upon which the canvas of electoral politics is painted is determined by the scenery that is its context.
I am a socialist. I don't expect "socialism" from the NDP. It is not and has not been a socialist party really since the 70s. The fact that they admit this is excellent, since it frees up the discourse for others to take up.
I would like it if the NDP were a socialist party existing in a political landscape were socialism was a viable political view that could be expressed and acted upon in the electoral political arena, but it is not.
That is why is so strongly rejects completely absurd arguments made by some that the ONDP platform was "right-wing". Its fundamentals were firmly grounded in traditional social democratic principled of public service for the sake of public service, not for private profit, and corporate tax hikes, and reductions in consumption taxes, are clearly "left", if not socialist.
We can't let the tone of the times distort the basic definitions of left and right, regardless of how watered down they may appear in the electoral body of the NDP.