A modest proposal - How Democrats can win elections in the US
Im a liberal Democrat. I dont like losing elections and we shouldnt be. Democrats govern and Republicans destroy. We should be the majority party, but were not. Here are some suggestions about how we might go about fixing this.
First, a general note - We cant win elections or reach any of our goals without the support of working class people, including white men. The Democratic party is the natural home for them, but weve made it so they dont feel they belong here.
Enough with guns already. There are plenty of conservatives who recognize the value of reasonable gun control, but people are so polarized theres no way to find middle ground. So, chill out and work for solutions somewhere in the middle.
Back off some social issues.
Stop meaningless, feel good political actions, e.g. impeachment, kicking congress people out, hearings. Have you noticed that Republicans, following our example, have been using these same strategies more than we have.
Stop being outraged every time Trump does something you dont like. Hes been around politically for 10 years and it hasnt worked yet. Screaming every time just takes the power out of our rhetoric. After a while it's hard to take it seriously. It also makes his supporters like him better. Enough with the end of democracy stuff. Even if there is truth in the claim, whining and yelling is not the proper response. Its not working.
Keep our focus on working class issues, e.g. support for unions, job creation through industrial policy. Biden actually has done a pretty good job on this, but people dont give us credit.
Keep supporting womens reproductive rights. This is a good issue for us.
Stop showing contempt for people you disagree with. I like and respect many Trump supporters whom Ive met. Of course they show contempt for us too. Too bad. Learn to live with it.
I'll try to think of more as we go along.
First, a general note - We cant win elections or reach any of our goals without the support of working class people, including white men. The Democratic party is the natural home for them, but weve made it so they dont feel they belong here.
Enough with guns already. There are plenty of conservatives who recognize the value of reasonable gun control, but people are so polarized theres no way to find middle ground. So, chill out and work for solutions somewhere in the middle.
Back off some social issues.
- Transgender rights - Few things bother conservatives more than this. Find solutions other than browbeating and jamming our values down their throats, e.g. provide funding to send transgender students to private schools where they will be more welcome. Use government funds to install unisex bathrooms in schools willing to use them.
- Stop hating white men. No, not everything is their fault. Movements like Black Lives Matter infuriate people. Heck, they infuriate me. And they dont work.
- Im a supporter of gay marriage but it cost us a lot. I think the court decision was a good one. But it radicalized a lot of of conservatives.
Stop meaningless, feel good political actions, e.g. impeachment, kicking congress people out, hearings. Have you noticed that Republicans, following our example, have been using these same strategies more than we have.
Stop being outraged every time Trump does something you dont like. Hes been around politically for 10 years and it hasnt worked yet. Screaming every time just takes the power out of our rhetoric. After a while it's hard to take it seriously. It also makes his supporters like him better. Enough with the end of democracy stuff. Even if there is truth in the claim, whining and yelling is not the proper response. Its not working.
Keep our focus on working class issues, e.g. support for unions, job creation through industrial policy. Biden actually has done a pretty good job on this, but people dont give us credit.
Keep supporting womens reproductive rights. This is a good issue for us.
Stop showing contempt for people you disagree with. I like and respect many Trump supporters whom Ive met. Of course they show contempt for us too. Too bad. Learn to live with it.
I'll try to think of more as we go along.
Comments (158)
Quoting T Clark
You know how I think the Democrats could have won this election? If they had nominated an old-style National Review-type Republican in the tradition of George H. Bush, Eisenhower, David Brooks, George Will , Charles Krauthammer, Liz Cheney and David Frum (strong on national defense, supportive of an anti-Russia policy, economically libertarian and socially moderate). Progressives would have held their noses and voted for such a candidate over Trump, while enough potential Trump voters would have changed sides to put the Democrats over the top. But that could never happen , for a few reasons. First, the party would never support an old line conservative. Second, and most important: what the large densely-populated urban centers (which is where most democrats are concentrated) need is very different from what rural voters and social conservatives need. 70% of economic productivity and wealth generation is located in Democrat-dominated urban centers, and Democrat views on everything from energy policy to healthcare and education are direct expressions of their understanding of what it takes to make that economic engine thrive.
Trump supporters know exactly how to make an economy of the 1950s thrive, but thats a recipe for failure in the 21st century. The urban dwellers are speaking a foreign language to the ears of Trump supporters, not just on social issues but also economic ones, so we progressives cant expect the majority of the country who supports Trump, and a return to the economic thinking of a previous century, to fork over their money to support our causes. We need to find a way to use our own plentiful resources to further our way of life in the cities, which will only pull us father away from traditional America but is necessary for us to thrive on our own terms. The Democratic coalition between intellectuals and blue collar workers which was successful for 50 years worked because the great majority of people in both the cities and small towns were less educated workers. That coalition cant be put back together in an era when the thinking of educated urbanities has moved so far away from that of the rest of the country. There is no language in common anymore, not on science, ethics, faith or economics.
I wonder if foreign policy is relevant to those eventual voters and motivates them to vote for one or the other.
There are a lot of examples of that, but it comes to mind three:
1) Palestine's sovereignty. I guess Democrats are pro-Palestine, but I don't know if it is an important matter amongst the voters
2) European Union. Democrats see us as friends or pals, at least. Republicans are clearly against us, and they flirt with Russia. Maybe it could motivate the voters that their leader prefers European valueswe are not perfect. I know. I know.rather than Putin's old-school hating style of everything and everyone.
3) UK. Republicans seem to flirt with Brexit and isolating them even more. This is a terrible idea, and the Western world should be united, not chopped into chunks. A person who believes in a united world should vote Democrat.
But all of the above is from a foreign policy perspective, and I don't know to what extent this is relevant for the average American voter.
I disagree that Republicans destroy any more so than any other ideological movement destroys. Conserving by nature seeks to preserve the status quo, so destruction it would seem, is more useful to a liberal than a conservative. Liberals by nature seek to overthrow (destroy) existing institutions, mores and customs.
But I knit-pick. I agree with most of your post.
Save for reproductive rights being a good issue for liberals. Its a loser issue for both sides. The sides have hardened as protecting the baby by destroying the mother versus protecting the mother by destroying the baby. Losers all around. Both parties should figure out a way to start that conversation over. Conservatives should abandoned government intervention and focus on charity if they want to change minds and save unborn babies from being aborted, and liberals should be less spastic about slippery slopes - abortion is legal all over the place. Make some laws and deal with it (many of the abortion protection measures won a greater majority than Trump did, showing that many conservatives or people in general, are going to keep on protecting or extending abortion rights.). On current terms proposed by either side, abortion is a loser issue lodged deep in each partys respective base so it is useless to move any needles.
Hating white men is just a bad idea, and it contradicts human rights. Maybe just hate the bad white men, for the sake of all good people, which includes the good white men? The whole line of liberal thinking about the hetero paternalistic white male has to be reevaluated. Its just too simplistic, too reductive, too brittle when challenged, and any white dad who sees value in hating white dads because they are white and a dad is kidding himself.
Hating guns and gun owners - another loser like abortion. Guns and gun owners, like unwanted pregnancy and abortions, are here to stay. Figure it out, regulate it, set limits, argue to change minds, but do not ban. Here, the republicans have to get over the slippery slope bullshit. Homeowners dont need nuclear weapons. Find some lines, adapt them as technology changes, but recognize government will always need to regulate this.
I dont think it is moral to see any individual as you might see a stereotype. Talking about liberals and conservatives helps move conversations in big steps, which is fine. But to hate me personally, for instance, because I am a conservative or a white male, to even think that you know someone because he said he was a conservative, is just wrong. Our politicians, leaders, and media, and most of all, you and me, do this all of the time. We ignore the individual by seeing only some stereotype. Politicians and media want to rally voters or sell ad space, so they dramatize stereotypes of evil-doers and throw whole groups of people in them. Its immoral, or simple-minded, or childish, or simply ignores the texture ad complexity that actually exist.
We all need to remember the people in our lives that we know and love who also happen to vote for the other party. We have to humbly accept that our own opinions may be the wrong ones and listen. Just listen to the other side and sift through all of their stereotypical bullshit for some semblance of a good reason they might think differently than you do.
Both sides need to listen to each other. Because I love some people who vote democrat and some people who vote republican I asked how it can be that I can see polar opposites at the same time as I see the same love and friendship? How are liberals good? How are conservatives good? I came up with this analogy: picture a baby in a small tub of dirty water. Conservatives see the baby and say look at how cute babies are, we may want to do something to clean the water but no matter what we need to preserve that cute baby. Liberals see this and say look at how ugly that water is, we may need to do something to protect that baby, but no matter what that water has to change. Conservative impulses are to preserve the good; liberal impulses are to change the bad. Both are needed.
Everyone is looking to do good. But we are often mistaking two different conversations (baby or bathwater) for two different ideas of what good means. No one wants to actually listen to each other. Most dont think the other side is worth listening to or capable of listening to our side, because of stereotypes bombarding us by the media and the politicians.
We should never think of our political party of choice as anything more than a convenience. We de-humanize ourselves when we buy into the categorization of whole groups of people as deplorable or vermin or even simply they. They is our own family, our neighbors and friends.
That's a good point. I didn't mention it because I'm not sure any foreign policy position would have much impact on an election here.
Quoting javi2541997
I think Palestinian sovereignty is the right thing, but it is a fraught issue here in the US and it's not clear to me who it helps. Both Jewish and Arabic voters tend to vote Democratic. One or the other is going to be pissed off no matter what you do.
Quoting javi2541997
I'm sure Putin is happy with the election. Trump has made his lack of support for Europe and NATO clear. Again, I don't think this would be a major factor in whom Americans would vote for.
Quoting javi2541997
I think both Democrats and Republicans are moving in an isolationist direction, probably Trump more than Biden. An example - Biden's policy focusing on manufacturing jobs here in the US. All and all, I think globalization has been bad for American workers, but, again, I'm not sure who is helped or hurt politically.
The problem is that I feel like party leadership understands the latter but they actively choose not to change in order to maintain their influence. The neoliberal status quo era is over and to be able to push back against the populist right the left needs a populist message of their own. It's clear what that message should be but that makes the elites in the party uncomfortable so they'll do everything they can to push out any potentially inspiring candidates with a bold vision even if it comes at the risk of putting up dull and pathetic figures like Biden.
Quoting T Clark
Yeah but it's hard to see most Jewish voters being mad simply for reining in Netanyahu from committing war crimes vs. Arabs who will be mad if you don't. Obama was able to stand up to Israel on issues like the Iran Nuclear Deal but his support from Jewish voters remained strong.
There used to be moderately liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Not anymore. The Democrats in Congress couldn't even work with moderates like Manchin and Sinema, so they're gone now. So, I think your idea is pie in the sky. For me, Biden was exactly the right candidate. As far as I'm concerned, he is the best president in my adult lifetime. My first election was in 1972. I voted for McGovern. What I'm looking for is a strategy so that candidates like him or Harris can win.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure what to say to your characterization of the differences between Democrats and Republicans. It's certainly an oversimplification. I also think it's not accurate. I think on economic issues, Democratic policies are better for working class people, no matter where they live. That's the point of my post - we have to back off on primarily social policies that drive these voters away.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think internal isolationism will work. Many of those liberal cities are located in conservative states. It also isn't the way I'd like to see it go. I think the values represented in the Republican party these days are those of a fairly small group of exceedingly ideological politicians supported by corporate business. The issues I raised in the OP are those I think, hope, might bring moderates back into my party.
Quoting Joshs
I think you're overstating the case, but I don't necessarily disagree. I think the right description of what you call "less educated workers" is just working people. They're the people who the Democratic party needs to bring back. They belong with us. I just want to make sure they're not being kept out by issues and political strategies not central to our political philosophy.
What you're saying is an opinion shared here as well. All in all, the left all over the world is posing as the voice of science and enlightenment, which can run the risk of falling into the trap of seeing others as wrong and morally indecent in order to negatively make the case that the observer and their views are correct and morally decent. To be blunt, this trap is mostly made up of people who have done bad things in their past who now are forced to repress their violent feelings to live arbitrarily free. If you are alive and breathing, chances are you have some moral indecency in you, one should be reminded of this from time to time. Whoever you are, you probably have a darker side of your personality and it needs to be fed regularly or else it will begin to hurt you from within.
This is a characterization of the differences between the parties/political philosophies that might have had some truth in the past, but it no longer does. Republicans no longer care about governing, they only care about winning and their strategy for achieving that is to drive people apart. Republicans are not conservatives in any meaningful way anymore.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I agree with this approach from a policy perspective, but I was only talking from a present day political viewpoint - what will win elections. The majority of Americans, including in conservative states, support reproductive rights, including abortion, with differences in details between regions. The vast majority support birth control.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Agreed, but that will take changes in attitude on both sides. In this discussion, I'm only looking at what Democrats can do without Republican support.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes. This is the main point I'm trying to make. Why can't we all just get along. I think most Americans still share more values, and more foundational issues, than they disagree on. Again, there are things Democrats can do without Republican participation.
Quoting Fire Ologist
When my family get together every year in February for my stepmother's birthday there are usually 15 of us and we're all strongly liberal. For the past few years my brother's parents-in-law have been coming. They're from South Carolina and are Trump supporters. We have to keep them at the far end of the table away from my sister, who is vociferous and uncompromising in here political positions. I'm surprised they keep coming. You can see it is hard for them to accept the members of the family with non-standard ways of life, but they are polite and keep it to themselves.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don't think that's necessarily true. Both parties have significant groups who care more about winning than governing. In the Republican party, that group has become the majority of the base.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don't agree. The Republicans have made themselves as a conscious political act the party who cares more about ideology than governing. It started in the 1970s.
But yes, you and I agree on most of this.
I don't think influence is the primary issue, although they do have to deal with those further to the left. I think they do what they believe, both personally and ideologically.
Quoting Mr Bee
What would a populist Democrat look like? What issues would they promote?
As I've noted elsewhere in this thread, I think Biden is the best president in my adult lifetime.
Quoting Mr Bee
Your probably right, I was wrong to focus on just Arabs vs. Jews. There are strong voices for Israel in both Republican and Democratic parties along with strong voices for Palestine with the Democrats. I think the general sense of chaos hurt Biden and Harris.
I don't think the manner in which Harris was chosen was the issue. My guess is that it was primarily that we let the Republicans set the agenda. My suggestions are meant to be a part of addressing that.
Quoting kudos
This is exactly the attitude I am arguing against.
Quoting kudos
Your opinion of human nature is different from mine.
Really? In what sense?
Quoting T Clark
I thought the same. Yet I considered that maybe those points would be also relevant to the American voter. Since I now understand that they might not be considered, I can't name more proposals or points to convince people to vote for Democrats. What if the donkey (I love the party logo) gives up on 'Indiana' or 'Oklahoma' and they put all the efforts in an industrialised working class like the one of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?
American wages, adjusted for inflation, haven't gone up since the 1970s. Good paying industrial jobs have been replaced by service jobs. The economic distance between working people and management and technical people has gotten much bigger.
Quoting javi2541997
The Democrats put very little money in conservative states except sometimes for specific federal candidates. Most money is spent for "swing states", e.g. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan.
Exactly what it was in my mind. Industrialised states with white working-class families. It surprises me that Georgia or Arizona are plausible states to flip them into blue. Good luck. Youand Europe, of course deserve politicians who govern and build up, not ones who destroy and divide people.
Good luck with that :)
I am a strong leaning conservative and you seem to be a strong leaning Democrat, so this should be an interesting conversation :smile: . IMHO, the reason the democrats lost is because they have lost the common sense constitutional values. They have been advocating for censorship, prosecution for differing beliefs, essentially the revocation of the 2nd amendment, child mutilation, the disbandment of basic gender distinction in society (like bathrooms), etc. I think America woke up and realized that this is getting out-of-hand; and wants to go back to Americas core values.
Every time I discuss gun control with a liberal, they always end up using the phrase reasonable gun control to advocate for the infringement of our 2nd amendment rights; and then turn around and say I am pro-2nd amendment just like you. The only form of gun control that is contextually aligned with the 2nd amendment, historically, is background checksthats it. You cant, e.g., say you are pro-2nd amendment and then turn around and ban the guns that are the most useful for rebelling against a tyrannical government (such as assault weapon bans).
One major reason Kamala lost is because she is on record saying that she will violate the constitution to force people to give the government their assault weapons.
Also, dont get me started on the non-nonsensical clowns at the ATFyou gave them an inch, and they certainly took a mile.
Who is funding this? It better not be my taxes.
Im ok with that, as long as it comes out of the schools existing budgets instead of raising property taxes on the community to get a bond.
The main difference I personally find between liberals and conservatives is that liberals tend to think all ideally and conservatives all pragmatically. You say lets do this to help with this and I say whos paying for it?...round and round she goes.
Agreed. Moreover, lets stop with the identity politicsits nonsense. This is another reason Democrats lost. People want a merit-based society, where race, gender, ethnicity, etc. do not matter. When liberals create, e.g., quotas for diversity based solely on those kinds of demographics (like race), thats reintroducing racism and what not into the mix. Pick the best people for the jobstop trying to force the outcomes.
I am not for gay marriage, but not because I think it is immoral per se (like stereotypical conservatives): its because the State has institutionalized marriage for the sole purpose of incentivizing the Human Good (in the Aristotelian sense) which involves, as a generally applicable rule, people having a lifelong, intimate, heterosexual, procreative, closed, and monogamous relationship with someone else. Once you tack on gay couples, theres no end: why not polygamous? Why not open relationships? Why cant 50 people go to the county and get married to each other as a group? Institutionalized marriage becomes trivial and, at that point, something, quite frankly, the government shouldnt be meddling in.
My questions for you would be:
1. Why should the government meddle in gay monogamous marriage but not gay polygamous marriage?
2. If the idea is just to have the State recognize people who are promising their lives, intimately, to each other, then why not like a libertarian stance and get rid of institutionalized marriage altogether? People could still get married in the metaphorical sense.
It is a good issue for you, since a lot of people agree in America with you; but, for me, its nonsense. You cant ensure womens reproductive rights by violating someone elses rightsthats immoral.
I dont have contempt for you Clark :heart:. I think both sides need to have more of these conversations.
Given how they've treated him it seems more like they fear Bernie than simply disagree with him. Biden was a mediocre politician who came in 4th in Iowa despite being the initial frontrunner in 2020. The reason why he got the nomination was because Bernie was about to win it and the party leaders acted very quickly to rally around Biden before Super Tuesday.
Quoting T Clark
Bernie is the easiest choice but anyone who has a bold vision that's different from the current Democrat party would be welcome as well.
Quoting T Clark
I'd say yes domestically, particularly with regards to the amount of major legislation he passed. That being said, his foreign policy was abysmal and his ego causing him to run again makes him one of the worst in my opinion. Honestly if he just chose not to run again and Gaza didn't happen we'd be having a different conversation but unfortunately we got to see a very ugly side of him this past year.
Quoting Bob Ross
Im curious. Did you vote for Trump or abstain from voting?
Im asking because all of the principled old-style National Review-style conservatives that I know of (David Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Liz and Dick Cheney, David Frum, Ross Douthat, David French, Brett Stephens and many others) have consistency refused to vote for Trump. I have concluded that one must be to the right of these people in ones social and religious views in order for a vote for Trump to be seen as better than not voting.
I voted for Trump, because I am afraid of what Kamala would have done to our country. My policy is to vote for the lesser of the two evils, and not to abstain in principle. To me, abstaining is a cop-out to not engage in a sticky moral dilemma: either I have to abstain because it would be immoral for me to do anything, or I need to do something about it. In this case, I don't see anything wrong with choosing the lesser of the two evils.
EDIT
I can see there point though: if it were Hitler or Stalin that I had to vote for, then, yeah, I am not voting and am probably going to start trying to overthrow the government.
You mean the continent altogether? :razz:
Jokes aside...
For a foreigner like me, it is complicated to understand America's core values. Following your views and posts, it seems that an American core value is gun freedom; also, you are against censorship, but you would avoid having a LGTBIQ flag in your classroom; then, you claim that it is essential to have different beliefs, but some of you label as 'Communist' the working model of Mondragón (Spain) for not being capitalist enough.
A core value... complicated, mate.
For me, it is to have a strong national healthcare system. So, to you is carrying a M-16 in your big polluting Ford truck.
Yep, you are definitely to the right of what used to be considered establishment Conservatism. I would say that the majority of the U.S. shares your view ( and always did), and that the outlook of educated urbanites is so far removed from your worldview that there is little room for compromise, which is fine with me. Trump supporters should work to strengthen the America that they believe in and urbanites need to do likewise. Neither side can be allowed to shove their values down the throats of the other side , so in order to protect the Union we need to devolve as much power to the states as possible, and the big cities need to think about coordinating with and supporting each other in more useful ways. I love my city and its values, and look forward to contributing to pushing it even farther away from Trump conservativism as it is now. I also love short visits to Trumps America, but I cant live there. I want both Americas to thrive, protected from each others values. (I know, youll say But my values are the morally correct ones, and the liberal cities are on the path to hell)
The split in values in America between Trump supporters and those who reject him correlates precisely with population density. I think youll find the typical values of those in New York City, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle overlap your own fairly well. You are Iberian, no? Isnt there a split of values in your country, as well as the rest of Europe and the U.K. between rural traditionalists and urban residents? Isnt it this split which contributed to Brexit , anti-immigrant sentiment, support for Le Pen and Italys socially conservative leader? America is a much less urban country than Europe , Britain or Australia, so there is a large ground for Trump support.
My country never had core values, Joshs. We are even more chaotic and incomprehensible than the USA.
We never really experienced the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution to have a view on rural and urban areas. When London was the core of industrial civilisation, Spain was still rural altogether, and we continued in this context until the 1980s.
I'm not sure what you mean by "core value." Gun ownership is a 2nd Amendment right and free speach is a 1st Amendment right, so those could be classified as core values. The 1st Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to teachers to fly whatever flag or post whatever poster in their classroom they want, so I don't see the hypocrisy there. Government buildings can have designated purposes, and it's not clear why it would be appropriate to have an LGBT flag hanging in the classrom or why it'd be appropriate to fly a right wing oriented flag.
America is a capitalist country, which makes it less Marxist than other countries, which I guess is just true. I don't know how much time Americans spend thinking and commenting upon the working model of Spain, but, to the extent it is more communistic than the US, that would likely not be something many Americans would want to emulate.
The US does have strong national healthcare. Your concern is over affordability and accessibility. That is not a Constitutional issue in the US, but it is true that a very large number of people do not want a government controlled healthcare system in the US.
The M-16? Sure, we all walk around with fully automatic rifles. As to the attack on the Ford truck, you've not just ridiculed the rednecks you envision bouncing around on the back roads with their rebel flags, but also the union workers who built those vehicles who @T Clark just lamented were leaving the Democratic party for this very reason.
If everyone who thinks differently than you is forced to listen to lectures about how stupid they are, then they'll stand behind Trump and laugh as he gives them the middle finger. And that's precisely what he represents.
Me either, Hanover. That's why I asked @Bob Ross. But you miss an important feature. He said 'American core values'. Are there Belgian core values? Swedish core values? Etc.
Quoting Hanover
The European Union is also capitalist, but whenever Social Democrats rule the Commission, they are labelled as 'Marxist' by some Americans. They aren't. That's what I tried to explain.
Quoting Hanover
It is not communist. They work using a cooperation method, instead of the average pyramidal hierarchy system. They are doing it well, but maybe it only works in small towns in Basque Country.
Quoting Hanover
Yeah.Quoting Hanover
I wish that was only ironical... but you know there are a large number of citizens who carry guns with them, and that's crazy when it is seen by the rest of us.
That's what the forum is for.
I am a strong liberal on policy and value issues, but a moderate on process, governance, and compromise. I don't think that's comparable to your type of conservativism. From what I can see you are a jingoist ideologue. You toe the party line and don't seem particularly interested in how the US will be governed as opposed to ideology.
Quoting Bob Ross
Says a supporter of the party that tried to overthrow the results of a free and fair election for president in 2020. The party that refused to consider a Democratic Supreme Court nominee for purely partisan reasons. This is a joke.
Quoting Bob Ross
I attributed a willingness to accept reasonable gun control to conservatives I know and know of. It includes such things as registration, permitting, background checks, gun safety, and restrictions on ownership for certain groups, e.g. convicted criminals. Most people in the US would approve of that type of measure. I think they would be approved by even those in conservative states if they trusted it wouldn't lead to more restrictive measures.
Quoting Bob Ross
I envisioned it being paid for by private funds. Liberals should put their money where their mouth is. Just like conservatives should put their money where their anti-abortion mouths are and provide funding for all those children they want to see born.
Quoting Bob Ross
This from the guy who wants to send US troops into other sovereign countries to force our ideological preferences down their throats. That's pragmatism?
Quoting Bob Ross
No. Republicans want to pretend the way black people have been treated historically is no longer an issue. It turns my stomach. The State of Florida has made it part of the school curricula that slaves benefitted from slavery. The government has to have a role in setting things right.
Quoting Bob Ross
The Republican party is as guilty of this as the Democrats. That's why I want to get us out of that business.
Quoting Bob Ross
For me, marriage has always been about protecting children. If you don't plan to have children, you shouldn't get married. That would apply to both gay and straight people. But that would never work, so allowing gay marriage is the only practical approach. The great majority of Americans, even in conservative states, support this.
I like Sanders a lot, but I don't think his kind of liberal can win. We need to be more in the center.
Quoting Mr Bee
You and I disagree on Biden.
You're right that the way Harris was chosen had a negative impact on the results.
Sure. My general point is that the Democrats need a more bold vision than what they have been doing which is offering essentially the status quo with some tweaks. I don't think you can really put an end to the populist right otherwise, since this is a time where people want to move on from the neoliberal era.
I'll say it again, I think Biden's domestic policies have been the right ones. I had hoped to see what he could do in the second term.
Oh wait
I'm not talking about candidates with good ideas, I'm talking about how to win. Sanders is too far left.
Everyone likes it when some government policy helps them. Many (including most low income people) resent it when something is done to help OTHER people, but not them. E.g.: the student loan forgiveness program. I personally never liked it, and I understand why working class people would resent it. This dovetails with some of the issues you raised: the perception is that focusing on LGBTQ issues implies not focusing on what is important to them.
Similarly with aid to Ukraine: many resent it. There's no apparent, immediate benefit to Americans. It's supportive of American ideals, and we liberal idealists support it, but this doesn't sell to many.
Quoting T Clark
Which is what I said: But that could never happen , for a few reasons. First, the party would never support an old line conservative.
Quoting T Clark
Of course Biden was exactly the right candidate for you. Youre a liberal. Im saying a liberal like you or Biden or Harris cant win unless they move far enough to the right that they become an old line conservative in the mold of G.W.Bush or Mitt Romney.
Quoting T Clark
I also think on economic issue Democratic policies are better for working people, but you will never convince them of that. Its not just a question of which issues the party focuses on, but of the approach taken to those issues. The Democrats could cease talking about every contentious social issue (gender rights, gun control) and concentrate strictly on bread and butter issues affecting peoples pocketbooks, and they would still lose unless they moved far enough to the right to be indistinguishable from old line libertarian free-market Conservatives.
Quoting T Clark
I think youre making a colossal mistake in judgement. American right wing populism isnt driven from the top down, but from the bottom up. Its a grass roots movement driven by your neighbors outside of your urban bubble. Talk to them and youll see what I mean. Talk to Bob Ross about the platform you think would bring voters back to the Democrats and see how far you get.
Quoting T Clark
I focused on working people, but the heart of the issue isnt workers, its a socially traditionalist value system shared by workers and wealthy people, those without college educations as well as those with advanced degrees, who are mostly from lower population density regions, with occasional exceptions like Trump. The main issue is what I call social I.Q. One can have a PhD and still rank low on social I.Q. What is social I.Q.? It is the sophisticated understanding of the complex systemic relations between individual and social behavior, and the best living laboratory for learning about it is residence in a diverse, cosmopolitan high population density urban center. The only way to bring back Trump-supporting workers, business owners and scholars is either to abandon economic and social policies based on social I.Q. (which is what most liberal-pprogressive economic policy is based on), or change Trump-supporters value systems, which cannot be done externally. They have to evolve on their own terms , at their own pace, incrementally over a long period of time.
I suspect this is correct. In your assessment, is Trump sincere or simply harnessing the available populism?
Trump thinks like his supporters, so in that sense he is sincere. That doesnt mean that he isnt an opportunist, but hes an opportunist who sees the world the way they do.
Quoting Joshs
Sounds like a lethal impasse for the next 10 or 20 years.
Quoting Joshs
That's an interesting take. I don't think I've heard it said that Trump shares the views of his base. The only commentary I am familiar with is that he has zero convictions and merely harnesses the fears and bigotries of the unsophisticated to propel his movement. Liberal propaganda?
I watched some Trump speeches and saw him on Rogan and found him spontaneous, engaging and self-deprecating, I can see why people like him.
The biggest problem with democrats is that they are unable to market and speak to the working class. They aren't creating a political core that can be gathered around, there are no slogans or easily summed policies and democrats openly fight among themselves about policies that mean nothing to the regular voter.
I don't think the progressive support need to be dampened. I think the opposite is true, the problem is actually that democrats need to get away from the center because it doesn't offer anything. The working class have problems or feel that they have problems that need some solutions and the center liberal position will mostly just perpetuate things as they've always been.
I think you need to check this video I posted in the election thread. He sums things up pretty well. Look at the map of support for Sanders, that's what the people want, not what politicians want. The liberal democrats have been failing for so long now, losing support because they cater to lobbyists and center liberals with no actual insight into what politics that the people want.
The people want support in their life. The politics Sanders stand for is basically to install basic living conditions found in Scandinavia, or at least half way to it. If the democrats actually took a step to the left rather than waddling around in the center (as they've already have been for long now), then they would actually show people solutions.
Democrats suffer from the basic thing of "trying to satisfy all you will satisfy no one". They gained so little from catering to trying to win republican voters that they lost democrat voters.
Just stand up for something instead of trying to dilute everything down to nothing.
No he isnt. Which is the point. His ideas are good and popular separating him from these proposals and saying hes somehow too far left is absurd.
But I suppose we can keep pretending that going farther and farther right will eventually pay off.
My suggestion: Do not approach the conversation as if you are the arbiter of moral truth, and the only available acceptable option. This is partially the reason Democrats constantly fail to inspire. They are authoritarian, as to people's views of them. In practice, though, there is little difference to the average person.
Your responses, over the course of months, suggest that you perhaps are not able to see this clearly. It suggests that, perhaps, you are in an ideological hole unable to even consider positions that make you uncomfortable. This has nothing to do with whether, or any specific issue, you hve the facts right. You probably do, in many cases. But to open a thread like this, the way you have, is extremely off-putting and highlights communication issues for the party. It seems you've taken on the same playbook in your own communiques.
This is why Democrats lose. There is no critical thinking. There is pandering and cowing to pressure. Sure, there is on the other side, but at least the last eight (10, i guess) years, that hasn't been a selling point or a legitimate criticism as it had been previously (and why, previously, I strongly lent democrat and on paper, probably still appear that way issue-for-issue). Republicans won this round because Democrats and the Party appear like shitty movie sets - no depth, push-over, shallow "how do we get votes" type of campaigning.
Perfect take, imo.
Haha, I see your frustration. Yes, people on both sides of the political isle are inconsistent in their beliefs.
By American core values, which I am surprised none of the liberals on here called me out on this yet (in such a manner as to bring up all the historically bad aspects of our culture that existede.g., slavery), I mean the fundamental moral, political, and metaphysical ideas embodied, albeit imperfectly at the time, in the constitution, the declaration of independence, and the founding fathers.
No, I am not saying that the founding fathers were perfect in their beliefs; but I think we can give them a charitable read and understand what they were going for fundamentally without accepting all the actions and habits they did and had as absolutely correct.
These values, which I did NOT put in order of importance, were:
1. Inalienable rightse.g., the right to life, liberty, and property. Everyone has certain rights because their nature is such that they are a person.
2. Freedom of religion. Everyone should be able to follow their own notion of what is good, as long as it doesnt impinge on other peoples rights.
3. Freedom of speech and press.
4. The right to not be unreasonably searched.
5. The right to not self-incriminate.
6. The right to bear arms.
Etc.
Liberals are moving away from these core values in the name of social justice.
Absolutely, Jefferson once wisely said that a rebellion from time-to-time is healthy for rebalancing society just as much as a storm from time-to-time is healthy for the earths ecosystem. Government inherently gravitate towards tyranny, and the friction which helps prevent it is the people being well-trained in and capable of owning lethal weapons.
I see what you mean; but freedom of speech is not the right to say whatever you want whenever you want. It is the right, ceteris paribus, for a citizen, as having the role of a mere citizen, to say what they want without fear of the government punishing them.
The role a person is currently assuming in society influences their duties. E.g., a cop cannot tell a person false information about the law, a government official cannot give their own opinions at a press conference when they are supposed to be representing whatever the government decided to say, etc.
So, yes, a teacher cannot express in their classroom their own particular opinions on things in a manner such as to indoctrinate their students into believing those opinions. Their job is to teach the kids the curriculum, and ensure their basic well-being.
Ive never heard of that business structure before, but prima facie it looks good. Nothing about it is communistic nor socialistic (prima facie).
I think a healthcare system that is actually governed by the free-market would be best; and the right to bear arms is more important: what does good health care do if you cant protect your rights?
The problem America has with health insurance is that it is giant scam: they have no competition; theres no transparency; and the whole idea of insurance is purposefully convoluted to make those companies more money. If the government forced them to engage in a free-market just like the old barber shop on the block, then it would be much better IMHO.
I am not sure how that is the case.
What do you mean? I am not following.
Conservatives love limiting government; and unions are ehhhI see how they are necessary sometimes, but sometimes they are just another form of the eradication of the free-market.
What do you mean? :lol:
Yup. I try to be as open-minded as possible and charitable to opposing positions; but, e.g., California is a shit show.
Not propaganda, just hypocritical nonsense, I think, designed to support the emotional responses to politicians you abhor. I was guilty of doing this, as a 'democrat', for like a decade.
Nothing per se wrong with that, though. Do what makes you most comfortable. Only lying about a politician would be - in this case, I think its just jacked-up weirdos doing the exact same gymnastics they do in their day-to-day lives to cover up hypocrisies and inconsistencies. That said, there seems to me to be far more willingness to lie, or at least allow untruths, to propagate as a specifically political tool on the Left.
I am not ultra-nationalist; but I am a nationalist. I think you are conflating the two, but maybe I am wrong.
I am failing to understand the dichotomy here: the US government vs. idealogies. What do you mean?
The idealogy is what is baked into the way the government worksall societies are that way. Everyone adheres to some (in)complete idealogy: are you suggesting theres something wrong with that?
Trump did try to do that, and I do not approve of that.
I am fine with that: are you saying you wouldnt want to pick a democrat over a republican if you could choose for the supreme court?!? That doesnt make sense to me.
Hmmm, those conservatives, then, I disagree with. E.g., registration is so antithetical to the 2nd amendment. Dont you agree?
The only one that makes historical and contextual sense is banning ownership for certain convicted criminals (like violent felons): the constitution was written in terms of what reasonably law-abiding citizens would have as protections.
I hope not: then we are doomed. People have forgotten the freedoms and rights that the founding fathers wisely envisioned.
Thats fine, and I agree.
This is a straw man and a red herring. I am saying that there are situations where countries have a duty to subject other countries to their valuese.g., North Korea, Talibanian Afghanistan, etc.
I cant speak for all republicans on that (although I dont think you are right here), but I can say that trying to provide retributions is nonsense and is unfair. You cant make a right with two wrongs.
I dont ignore that bad things happened, but turning our society into a identity politics game from a merit-based system regresses society.
Did you actually read it??? I dont think you did. Here it is: https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20753/urlt/11-3.pdf . They did not censor any of the horrors of slavery in there.
How? Conservatives are trying to get rid of it.
This is not a republican position, per se. I also highlight something which seems to be missed by all and sundry trying to advocate for various schemes. They are historical grievances. They literally not in issue. Barely a man in the land would deny their reality and import. What to do about the historical wrongs is what's at issue. So, this formulation is entirely wrong. The historical wrongs are not an issue anymore, plainly. The same way the gross, extreme and comparable (or exceeding) wrongs visited on northern Europeans, North Africans by North Africans in the 15-18th centuries is no longer an issue.
However, the treatment of Northern Africans by other Northern Africans today is an issue that no one seems to want to talk about, in this context. Its a pretty telling issue, though, that America abandoned slavery and Northern Africa has not.
I started out ambivalent about the program but came around to feeling it was a good idea. From what I can tell from the web, support for forgiveness was lukewarm at best. As you can see from my OP, I'm not so much worried about the Democrats policies as I am their non-policy actions.
Quoting Relativist
Most Americans support aid for Ukraine across the political spectrum. Whether or not there is resentment from some, I don't see it as an issue that is relevant to my concerns as described in the OP.
What do you think he would do in a second term?
I don't like any politicians.
What I am looking for is an answer to the quesion is it true when commentators say -
Quoting Tom Storm
The whole point of my OP is that this isn't true, so, clearly, you and I disagree.
Quoting Joshs
The majority of Americans, including in conservative states, support same sex marriage. Electorates in Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas - conservative states - voted to remove abortion restrictions or prevent changes in current law. The Republican party is not driven from the bottom up. It has been taken over by a relatively small group of rabid ideologues whose policies don't match those of their constituents.
Quoting Joshs
Sure, social conservatism is an important aspect of the Republican electorate, but we don't need all Republican voters. A large percentage of Republicans don't support Trump because of traditional values.
Agreed. Part of the point of my OP is that there are extraneous issues, which I described, which are preventing creating such a political core.
Quoting Christoffer
I don't agree with this. I think Biden's domestic policies have been the right ones, but they have been overshadowed by the social and political issues I described in my OP. Even if you're right, I don't think that undermines the value of what I proposed.
Quoting Christoffer
I like Sanders and I like a lot of his policies. You and I just disagree about what policy approach is the right one given political conditions in the US now.
Your opinion of my attitude is not really of interest to me.
Your recent thread "In Support of Western Supremacy, Nationalism, and Imperialism" makes it clear this is not true.
Quoting Bob Ross
I can't think of a response to that. You live in a different moral world than I do.
Quoting Bob Ross
Ditto.
Quoting Bob Ross
As I noted, not all conservatives feel that way.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, I heard what you said. It could not be further from pragmatism.
More support for American workers and industry.
There's no sense in arguing about this in this thread. I have a hard time dealing with people who think that minorities, especially black people, somehow now have a level playing field in our society. It's not that is was historical, it's that it continues.
My response to that question, is the quote you've used. I think that quote describes the behaviour in that question you wanted an answer to :)
A clear reading of my post would illustrate this is not what's being put forward. I refer to the Democratic party and their abysmal failures throughout. IF you read it this way, that explains a huge amount. I am not trying to be rude - this literally clears up some misapprehensions, from my position, you've engaged in. Not a disparagement.
Quoting T Clark
You have to be suggesting that slavery, or systematic (i.e open, and admitted) racism is extant. It isn't. Plainly (please don't be silly - obviously there are racist individuals, but the hyper-vigilance of your kind of thinking violates any sense of reason). So, unless you're suggesting the above, your position is nonsense. You're right, it's not worth arguing about. Either you notice reality, or you don't. This one is a direct disparagement, though.
Trump is a livelier corpse than Biden, but will likely run a far worse administration. Should Trump succumb to the grave, I expect nothing better from Vance.
It seems like it will be a while before Democrats will have another chance to prove to the working class that they are the best party for working people. It could easily be at least 4 years. Never mind better rhetoric. They need to burn to pass legislation that directly benefits working people in a substantial and enduring way. They could, for instance, pass laws (and fund their enforcement) removing barriers to unionization efforts. They could raise the federal minimum wage ($7.25 since 2009) substantially. They could regulate for better wages, working conditions, and benefits (the capitalists will howl in agony). The workers who most need a helping hand are the less educated, less skilled. What these people need are actual jobs, many of which were shipped off to Asia or Mexico.
I'm a long-standing member of the GLBTQ++ "community". We are not such a large constituency of the Democratic Party that we should be the focus of party policy. WHAT? Yes. The group that gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and queers ++ belong to is first and foremost, working class. As deviant as we might or might not be, we have to do what everybody else has to do -- work for a living. Drop the identity focus. Whatever race, ethnic group, religion, or sexual predilection we are, we have deep common interests and needs AS WORKERS.
And another thing: Find and cultivate young talent, young leadership. and younger candidates. Enough with geriatrics already. (I'm 78; so is T Clark. Brilliant as we are, we're too old to be president, so don't look at us).
A discussion for a different thread.
It is still very complicated to me to see bear arms as a constitutional right, or even more, a core value of a nation. Whenever some of you strongly defend the right of having access to weapons, I would like to answer. You want to have a weapon in your home to defend yourself from whom? -- Also, is there a correlation between carrying guns and safety? I think not. -- On the other hand, don't you trust your own neighbours or officemates? If you think that you live in a safe county, I can't see why you should have a gun in your house.
It seems like if we decide to ban you from bearing guns, you would feel 'oppresed' by the state, and your freedom will not be fulfilled.
Quoting Bob Ross
Interesting. Why don't you view social justice as a core value too?
Quoting Bob Ross
Holy sh*t. You left me speechless. It is true that my country is poorer, but honestly, here reigns more common sense than there. I guess it is the luck of being born in Europe.
Quoting T Clark
It's no secret that the Israel lobby holds great sway over American politics, and the lobby must have been on the side of the Republicans, since the Democrats have been trying to put pressure on Israel whereas the Republicans have expressed support.
The Israel lobby represents a diverse collection of special interests, and their influence extends to far more demographic fields than just American Jews.
As the situation in the Middle-East worsens, which is likely to happen under Trump, the lobby will ramp up their efforts to secure support from the US government.
With Israel on the cusp of regional war, in my opinion it is almost unthinkable that an American president is elected who is critical of Israel in any meaningful way.
I agree. Yet I was wondering whether it is important to them for foreign policy affairs or not. Jewish lobbies are important on a national level, but I asked if someone also cared about what happens far beyond their frontiers. I used the example of Palestine because it seems that this is part of the 'woke culture' and Democrats might not feel comfortable talking that much about this problem. It is more clearer in Europe, apart from those who are blind to the situation.
The same happens regarding their relationship towards the European Unionor just Europe, I know you are not very fond of this institutionand the UK. Because these are the Western world as we know it, and I guess American voters also vote driven by how the USA would behave in that context or political arena.
Did you check the video? I'm not really arguing out of what I would like to see, but it seems that this is what the people want to see. The most supported candidate among the people were Sanders, he's able to talk to the people, not stand there and "pretend to be human" which other candidates do like if they were aliens who landed and tried to "speak human".
Policies doesn't really matter, it's how the politics are communicated to the people. Democrats don't understand how to do that and get lost in how to talk to people.
Like when Sanders talked to the Fox news crowd, he didn't shout complex policies in their faces, he asked them what they wanted, then gave them answers to it. Easily understandable answers that were basically much more left than what democrats offer today, but when it came in the context of the audience's worries and wants, they understood them rather than giving a knee jerk reaction.
The fundamental problem in the US is that no center or right wing policies will fix the actual problems that the US is facing. The economic inequality is increasing and people are getting poorer and more uneducated while working conditions destroy people. It's a death spiral that needs fixing, otherwise the US will become adjacent to a third world nation featuring a rich elite and a majority of poor people. It can be spotted in things like height.
While it's tempting to promote the same old tactics of promoting the free market to adjust this themselves, it doesn't happen. It's not how such problems are fixed. And it's easily to communicate this to the people as it's their own situation that's talked about.
The core problem for democrats is that rather than promoting a political stance, they're just trying to sound like the "good guys". But that doesn't help when there's nothing tangible for people to hang onto. It's very telling when the rightwing conservatives talk a lot of nonsense, but people listen to that because "at least they want something".
Like, are people so starved for a direction in politics that "whatever direction" is the most popular choice?
It's actually a trend among the more left leaning politics of the world that they mostly try to cater to right-wing ideas in order to win votes. They've been so focused on trying to "gain back votes" that they've forgot what actually gave them votes in the first place.
The most telling is that throughout the western democracies, the working class and the poor has always been supporting the left because they were on their side. But today, these people vote for the right, without the right having any actual tangible solutions for them. Where's the actual politics for the working class? For fighting actual economic inequality?
The left of the western world seems to have become rich posers who're basically the same as hipsters who try to look like they're hard working poor people in clothing and lifestyles, but are in fact rich upper class. The left has become a form of comic con for the working class, pretending to be on their side without ever being it. Using progressive politics as a form of lifestyle aura in order to look like they care for the struggling people. It doesn't work, clearly.
The left of the world need to find their roots. We live in a time in which actual left politics are needed, in which the working class is screaming for solutions. But the left are too afraid to get their hands actually dirty.
So what if you lose votes on the right? They don't matter if you lose a larger hand on the left because you left them in the dirt.
Quoting Bob Ross
Do you mean liberals or left-wing politics? Because left-leaning politics have nothing to do with it. Just look at Scandinavia:
1. How does that come in conflict with anything in left politics? What type of liberties do places like Scandinavia not have for instance? Because we have all of those liberties.
2. This is also not coming into conflict with actual left politics. It's true for places like Scandinavia as well.
3. If we're looking at actual statistics of this, Scandinavia ranks higher than the US, so it's not the political leaning that's preventing this.
4. This right is better followed in Scandinavia than in the US.
5. Not a problem in Scandinavia.
6. This one is the only thing that differs, because it actually has nothing to do with human rights, it's a constitutional law based on types of weapons that aren't remotely alike what exists today. The problem with this is that the research is clear on the connection between amount and availability of firearms and deadly violence. That if reduced, deadly violence is also reduced. To put into perspective, if you flip this and instead say "the right to not be a victim of gun violence", which is more akin to an actual citizen right as a protection, then such a right is fundamentally broken by the status of deadly gun violence in the US. The sixth amendment does not correlate with fundamental human rights or values of liberty, it's a made up concept of liberty that no other nation with similar values of liberty shares. The arguments for it are arbitrary and does not have a fundamental impact on the freedom of the people. The only notion of freedom it is connected to is within the context of civil war and uprising, so at its core, the importance of it is only valid when all other constitutional laws are broken. Basically it becomes meaningless and gets an irrational amount of importance in a context it does not have.
Would you say that Scandinavia has more social justice than the US? In what way do you define social justice? How come Scandinavia have more left politics while still having more freedom of speech and protections of citizens rights?
Fundamentally, in what way do you connect actual left politics with limiting those core values? Disregard the sixth amendment because, as I described, it's not actually a fundamental component of liberty, none of the other amendments are worse in Scandinavia, they're even better protected, and yet, the politics are on the left.
So I really don't understand why right wing and conservatives use these things as arguments against left politics. There's no connection. The US could have a major welfare overhaul and mitigate economic inequality, protect workers rights, free education etc. and still have strong protections of the constitution.
The whole idea that left politics try to destroy the constitution is just fiction. It's a made up conflict and propaganda narrative to produce fear among right wing conservatives that the left will take away your rights. But looking at Scandinavia these rights are even better protected and followed and they still have better living conditions for more people due to the left politics being the core political stance.
Most of the US democrat vs republican debates and conflicts are generally about made up bullshit. It's why democrats stopped voting for democrats, because they don't offer any actual left politics. While the republicans spiral down into absolute nonsense through Trumpism, with policies that have nothing to do with reality based on conspiracies and Christian fundamentalism.
Basically, people in the US have gotten lost in politics through focusing on nonsense rather than discussing real issues. If you listen to both sides... where's the actual politics? Everything is a performance perpetuating these inflated fictional narratives rather than dealing with actual problems. If you think "social justice" is a real threat, it's not. It's not infringing on the constitution, it's not a real issue, it's a ghost story that you've bought into.
And who wins on these ghost stories? Keeping the people debating fictional issues rather than fixing real problems? The ones who can rise to the top by not making too much noise. Because when you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, who actually try to promote real left politics, he gets overthrown by his own party because he's "too much". While Trump's protection of billionaires work great for right wing politics so if he can hypnotize the working class with his nonsense, the billionaires don't have to fear real left politics threatening their dominance. Both sides trying to do as little as they can in order to just keep the problems away from their careers.
It won't hold.
Quoting T Clark
Were talking about Trump, not anti-gay, anti-abortion zealots. Trump is neither of those. But his policy views are to the right of old line Conservatives in the mold of Bush, who were not isolationists, did not support Putin, did not support high tariffs, etc. Is Trump and Trumpism (isolationist hyper-nationalism, xenophobia, a zest for tariffs instead of economic globalism, a tendency toward authoritarian rule and a love of authoritarians like Putin) the product of a relatively small group of rabid ideologues whose policies don't match those of their constituents? If you believe that, do you realize youre making the same claim about the basis of MAGA that they make about the basis of your support for liberal candidates? Trump supporters like to argue that a small cabal of progressive zealots (Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates) and the liberal press under their control manipulate Democratic voters for their own ends, that support for Trumpism is vastly wider than the liberal press claims it to be because of tampering with the vote by Democratic operatives.
Would the Democrats win back workers if they became America-first isolationists, went for high tariffs, anti-immigrationism and the gutting of Obamacare? Maybe. But would you vote for such a Democrat? And isnt that just MAGA by another name? The Democrats can reinvent themselves in whatever direction they want.Both parties have done so in dramatic fashion over the years. But the question is how they can do so now without turning into another version of Trumpism.
Wouldnt the response be: I am glad we at least agree on that!? I was agreeing with you.
:sad:
How do you not have a response to that? I thought the whole point of this OP was to open up the conversation, in good faith, to Democrats and Conservatives to demonstrate how the former is better.
You just ignored my entire post. How do you expect to convince people of your Democratic views if you are incapable of defending them?
Criminals and to overthrow a tyrannical government.
Absolutely. It takes a lot less training to use a gun for self-defense than melee fighting (like boxing, mma, using a knife, etc.), significantly safer for the victim to use (e.g., a knife fight ends with both parties at the hospital), it deters criminals from committing the crime in the first place being that a gun is the great equalizer (e.g., that scrawny women my be strapped), and can de-escalate situations (e.g., brandishing a firearm).
Exactly how many times a citizen lawfully uses a firearm for self-defense variously significantly depending on the agenda of the group putting out the study. At one point it was anywhere between 600,000 2.5 million times per year in the US; then it was 60,000 70,000.
The CDC came out with one that when to upwards of 2.5 million per year in the US, but then discreetly removed that study due to political pressure. The sad truth is that we probably wont know the real numbers because one side wants to use the most liberal of numbers and the other the most conservative of numbers to the point of exaggerations. Liberals dont want you thinking guns are used very often for self-defense, and conservatives want to think it is constantly happening.
I think a that a sublation of those two is probably correct: there are a significant amount of self-defense situations that happen in the US per year, but who knows exactly how much.
Correct. Once one gives the government the power to regulate arms, not just guns, is when they give up the ability to stop the government from doing horrible things.
I think it is, but I just dont view it the same as liberals. For liberals, it is all about identity politicse.g., you are black so we should care more because of the history around black people, you are gay so we care more because you are a minority, you are this, you are that, etc. I care about a merit-based society, and social injustice would be not judging based off of merit; and, ironically, the liberal form of social justice is a form of social injustice under this view, because they are judging people on the basis of their skin, sexual orientation, gender, etc. and not their skills.
I wasnt saying that socialistic healthcare cant pan out fairly well, and in fact it pans out relatively well in most European countries, but it isnt the bestthe best is a free market economy; and the US doesnt even have this in terms of its health care.
Now, bearing arms is more important, although health is also very important, because, like I said, who cares if the government holds all the power? One day, they could just decide to take your healthcare away from you, enslave you, send you to a concentration camp, etc. and what are you going to do about it? Try to stab them with your kitchen knives?!?
A US citizen has, at least, a fighting chance: they can legally buy fully automatic weapons, high caliber rifles, SBRs, shotguns, body armor, RPGs, etc. Now, the US government, especially the ATF, is always trying to ban them and red tape them; so theres regulations that are in place relative to how dangerous the ATF views it (e.g., true SBRs require a gun registry, which is unconstitutional); but my point is that we can own the stuff that actually could put a dent in a tyrannical governments attempted coup.
Again, seriously, what can you do in your European country if this were to happen? I guess you could try to manufacture improved explosives; but without the proper training you are going to risk blowing yourself up.
Two months ago my downstairs neighbor decided to go batshit insane and after I complained to the landlord the neighbor started threatening me.
Here, you're not allowed to carry any type of self-defense weapon and the police shrug their shoulders until something serious happens.
Bans on weapons perhaps worked well here in the past, when the police showed more teeth and people in general were more decent and functional.
As society becomes more dysfunctional, with dangerously unstable people everywhere as a result of drug abuse, crime, poverty, etc. either the police needs to step up their game, or people need to be allowed to defend themselves. Neither of which is probably going to happen here where I live..
Yep, it's all fun and games until people start threatening you and you realize the system leaves you utterly vulnerable with no way to protect yourself.
I dont know what the difference is; and, full disclosure, I am not familiar with Scandinavia but I will do my best to elaborate.
I am thinking of things that I would assume liberal and left-leaning countries would supporte.g., abortion, identity politics, etc.
I am thinking of the policies of liberal and left-leaning peoplee.g., persecuting people that do not believe homosexuality is morally permissible (although they agree that homosexuals should have equal rights), canceling people that do not agree with the liberal agenda, etc.
I am not familiar enough with Scandinavian countries to determine what kind of politics they really have there. I can tell you the US on that map is .93 and I can tell you that the left have been censoring information constantly; so I am guessing that these metrics are taken and calculated in a weird manner.
You definitely could not, and still cannot, post whatever you want, so long as it is not violating someone elses rights, on major liberal social media platforms.
I dont know. Perhaps.
The 2nd amendment is an inalienable right, which is fundamentally the right for a person to defend their own and other peoples rights with weaponry.
This is utterly false. There were machine guns, advanced muskets, cannons, explosives, etc. during the time that the founding fathers wrote the 2nd amendment; and, coupled with the fact that, they were not stupid and obviously could anticipate more advanced weaponry being developed and that they were very clear in their letters and literary works about giving people the right to bear military or better graded weapons to combat the government; so there is really no wiggle room for any sort of historical and contextual argument to be had that weapons of today were not intended to be covered under the 2nd amendment.
Although you are right that the homicide rate is higher in the US per capita than countries that ban guns, it is not true that violent crime is significantly higher in the US per capita. E.g., Great Britain still has major crime issues and has a very similar crime index to the US: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rate-by-country . There is absolute not evidence to support that banning guns actually helps innocent people stop violent crimes.
Likewise, banning guns doesnt necessarily equate to less crimes either, especially in countries where other parts of it can legally own them, such as Chicago: they have the strictest gun laws and it obviously is not working. Of course, one could try to attribute it to the fact that it is easy to cross into Chicago with legally obtained guns; but most of the guns they use in violent crimes are given to them illegally. However, I can anticipate and grant, to an extent, that it would be much harder for them to get those guns illegally if there wasnt the possibility of straw purchases.
That right already exists, and it is called the right to life. The point of the right to bear arms is, among one other reason, to allow people to who are victims to protect that right to lifeto, viz., protect their right to not be a victim of gun violence. Banning good people from having guns does not result in securing that right, because then you are relying on the government to protect themand statistically it is way easier to stop an attacker if you have a weapon on you than to wait for the police to arrive. I am not just talking about defense against a perpetrator with a gunthis also includes brass knuckles, knives, bats, and sheer physical strength (most of which are legal still in countries that ban guns). You cant just analyze it in terms of the increase of violence with gunsit needs to be relative to violent crimes in general.
I am assuming you meant to say 2nd amendment (as opposed to the 6th amendment), and I will tell you what I told another person:
The beauty of american valuesin Jeffersonian politicsis that it takes a cynical approach to the nature of the government and of the people and tries to come up with a balancea frictionbetween the two that keeps them in check. As Jefferson wisely said:
Jefferson to Madison, January 30, 1787 (underlined portions were added by me)
I dont know, because I do not pretend to know about politics in Scandinavia specifically. I am not well-versed on that.
I would define it as justice as it relates to personsviz., a subbranch of morality which pertains to how to treat other persons with proper respect and fairness.
What do you mean by left politics, and what does that look like in Scandinavia?
I am talking about liberalism as it relates to what I am seeing in Western societies. I noted them briefly at the beginning of this post.
The problem is that liberals try to do it in an unfair way: they try to just tax the rich or more well-off people in the community to pay for other peoples mistakes.
In my country, liberals are trying to censor speech, persecute people, take away our 2nd amendment right, mutilate children, overly-sexualize children, put men in womens bathrooms, put men in womens sports, etc. These are not fictions, my friend.
Yeah, thats generally fair; but not completely true.
Depends on what you mean by "make an economy thrive." Liberal urban enclaves in the US certainly thrive in terms of aggregate GDP figures. In terms of inequality they are the worst places in the US or Europe. In terms of social mobility they are matched only by the abysmal showing of the Old South. In terms of having a "racial caste system," they are in many ways even worse than the Old South. In Alabama or Kentucky, one might at least find white citizens driving an Uber, selling shoes, etc., and the largest inequality tends to be between the marginally employed and the small town dentist or car dealership owner, not between the similarly poor and billionaires.
I am always reminded of this when I have to travel to major cities or recall my time living in Manhattan, and consider how virtually 100% of the people who worked menial jobs there (which pay absolutely abysmally compared to the cost of living, comparatively far worse than in poor rural areas even) are immigrants from the developing world. During the height of the 2008 recession I worked as a dog walker in Brooklyn's affluent Park Slope neighborhood and encountered the bizarre world of "the help," in these neighborhoods, all the nannies being women from the Caribbean taking care of other people's children 14+ hours a day and leaving their own in publicly funded, overcrowded childcare facilities; all the cleaners and drivers, and my fellow co-workers from various parts of the globe, many without a leg to stand on for fighting back against rampant wage theft because they weren't citizens.
It's like Musa al-Gharbi says in his new book, the urban elite simultaneously like positioning themselves as saviors of the world's poor while ruthlessly exploiting them. For a long time I pushed back on conservative claims that urban elites favored foreigners to the native poor, but I'm starting to think it's absolutely true. They constantly draw flattering parallels between the "hard working," (i.e., appropriately desperate and pliable) new arrivals versus those pesky natives who refuse to "get with the 21st century" (the century where their wages and life expectancy have stagnated, or as often declined, for half a century straight.) And now that Trump has won a majority of male Latinos a predictable distinction between "deserving new arrivals" and those recalcitrant second and third generation Latinos is being drawn.
Of course, the people who see migration as something of a black and white "human rights issue," are also never going to house said migrants in their communities or schools in meaningful numbers. "Not in my backyard."
I could say more, but I think the best summary is that the "economy of the future," of places like NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, etc. starts to look a lot like the Gulf states and much of Latin America.
E.g.,
At the same time, Ukraine has given me grave doubts about these economies ability to defend themselves. They are far more a Carthage than a Rome. Surveys show a marked decline in their citizens' willingness to countenance fighting for their country and the service economy doesn't produce the prerequisites for defense. We can see this in the absolutely gigantic GDP disparity between Russia and the EU, and the fact that EU arms production remains absolutely anemic despite this advantage. North Korea seems better able to ramp up production than some of the world's largest economies.
By way of contrast, in most of the world, which offers far less by way of standard of living or political freedom, and where large minority populations that want to break away from their government are fairly common, the norm is still on more like 2/3rds to 3/4ths. The map sort of undersells the gap as well, because in the urban hubs of the "new economy," willingness to make personal sacrifices to defend that wealth is dramatically lower than outside the cities.
Can isolated pockets of vast wealth survive in a world dominated by scarcity while their citizens are unwilling to fight and while also being reliant on a steady stream of outside goods for the basic necessities of life? Maybe, such mercantile societies have existed before, and while they are often targets of conquest they sometimes managed to last for long periods. Can such societies survive long term in a modern context while continuing to have ever higher levels of inequality and ever lower levels of social mobility? Perhaps. Automation is changing warfare and security in the same way the stirrup did at the dawn of the Middle Ages, such that small elite cadres of well-equipped soldiers are more effective than mass mobilization. But most of the masses' rights were won precisely because they had leverage due to how their buy-in was essential to winning wars. What happens when they are increasingly irrelevant?
I am left thinking the "economy of the future," is more a sort of globalized neo-fedualism, although lacking religious checks on elite behavior, rather than anything admirable.
As I noted, I like Sanders. I think he'd make an... interesting president. I'd certainly vote for him. I still think centrist candidates have a better chance of winning.
Quoting Christoffer
I'm not sure any policies can solve the problems we've got coming up over the period of my children's lifetimes. As I've said, I think Biden and his policies were the best choice for the US.
This thread was not aimed at convincing people of my Democratic views. See the OP.
I think Trump is the glue that holds Republicans, who hate each other, together.
I'll be interested to see what happens when Trump is finally gone - whether the Republican party can hold on or whether it will fall apart.
Quoting Joshs
That's the whole point of my OP - to stop treating our political opponents with disrespect. Whatever I think of the political realities of where Republican support comes from, there's no need to put that on the table when we talk with them.
I think the Democratic Party would find this essentially impossible. First, because the primary system in the US, where candidates are selected by relatively quite small numbers of older/wealthier/more radical voters invariably pushes both parties away from the views of the median voter and towards the fringes.
But also because the Democrats core wealthy urban constituency, who make up most of its leadership class, have come to frame almost all of its core issues as continuations of the US Civil Rights movement (similarly, in Europe decolonization is the mold). There is no compromise here. Opponents are simply on the wrong side of history. Unpopularity is sort of irrelevant if you think your issue is a replay of allowing black citizens to vote in the 1950s. The Civil Rights Movement was also initially unpopular, although it was still the right thing to do.
The problem is that it isn't clear that issues like migration fit this mold, at least not in the wider public's view. Increasing migration currently polls worse for the US as a whole then Harris fared in many rural, overwhelmingly white Southern counties... yet elite opinion is at total variance here, and this is the common thread of success for the far-right across the Western world.
Anyhow, I can't help but think that feelings on these issues are sometimes extremely self-serving. Migration can only ever directly benefit a vanishingly small percentage of the population in the developing world. Remittances, people sending money back to their home countries, do more (they absolutely dwarf aid flows), but realistically something like defense level spending on aid (or what defense spending should be, a meaningful % of GDP) which helps people in their home countries is the only way to benefit the vast majority. Yet elite opinion has gravitated towards the option for helping the world's poor that just so happens to help a small select few while also giving them an endless pool of exploitable labor, continued upwards pressure on rents in urban areas, and continued downward pressure on prices for people with the excess wealth to consume.
And sometimes this cynicism is right out in the open. People will praise immigration for all the great restaurants they get to eat at regularly, while ignoring that the food services industry is particularly brutal and wages there totally unable to provide a decent standard of living in urban locales with high rents. Or they will point out how illegal immigrants are such a boon because they pay into Social Security and Medicare without being eligible for benefits, which is the very height of cynicism (and at any rate, it will certainly hurt society to have millions of mostly low wealth seniors who are ineligible for benefits in the long run, with the costs simply falling on their children).
There is truth in what you say and maybe you're right. That doesn't change my prescription, even if it turns out to be unrealistic. I just get so furious listening to my liberal friends spewing their contempt on people we have to figure out a way to get along with.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is something I left off my list that I should have included. I think Democrats have to figure out a way to walk the line on immigration. Biden tried to do this over the past year, but the Republicans put the kibosh on that.
Frankly, I dont think the current state of affairs allows significant fixing. Democrats will have a comeback after Trump/Republican policies destabilize the economy, theres a downturn, and Americans look to the alternative party to get out of the hole. Rinse and repeat.
Theres a fairly clearly articulated position right there. Now, lets see if we can figure out where you get your view of migration from in a philosophical sense. You see, Im not interested so much in determining a correct approach to migration as I am placing the views of someone like yourself in the context of the appropriate family of discourse on the subject. To be more specific, would you say that you tend to view political analyses of immigration put forth by conservative think tanks like the Hoover institute to be more persuasive than those of left-leaning think tanks? Ive read nuanced discussion on the subject from both sides, and some overlap too, but overall conservative tend to be less enthusiastic about the overall social benefits of immigration.
I don't think these analyses actually tend to differ that much, they just focus on different things. Your classical neoliberal advocates, along with your political liberals, tend to focus on immigrations effects on national level accounting. They do this because immigration looks overwhelmingly beneficial in this context.
Immigrants tend to be young so they lower your dependency ratio. This is a boon when transfer payments to seniors dominate your national budget. They might not fix the problem of a tsunami of retirees expecting to cash in on underfunded benefits, but at the very least they help to "kick the can down the road," (and we can also cynically appeal to the "benefit" of undocumented workers who are forced to pay in to benefits they cannot receive.) Defense is the other major national level expense, and it doesn't cost significantly more to run the US military if we add even tens of millions more people. If anything, it gives us additional manpower if a major war starts. Everything else at the national level is a pittance compared to these, so immigration comes out looking very good, and it boosts GDP growth.
However, if you shift to state and local budgets (which for the US is actually larger than federal spending, once entitlements are taken out), things look dramatically different. This is why nativists look here for their data. Immigrants sometimes represent a huge drain on the resources of local governments, particularly school districts. They bring a lot of new students into a district, generally with dramatically higher levels of special needs (which tends to mean dramatically higher per pupil expenses if you actually give them the support they need), while at the same time not offsetting this expense with higher property tax revenues, since they tend to be low income. And of course, immigrants tend to be crowded into already low income areas and low performing school districts. As liberal as elite suburbs might be, they are not going to take more than a token proportion of resettlement, so the costs overwhelmingly fall on the municipalities housing the very same people who are competing with new arrivals for jobs and housing.
In terms of inequality, the picture looks even worse. Obviously, adding millions of low net worth, low income (at the very least in the medium term) residents spikes inequality. And high immigration also seems to tank support for unionization and social welfare spending, even as an oversupply of labor reduces wages. I have written about this before: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10332/page/p1
In particular, immigrants impose congestion effects on other immigrants, meaning that prior immigrants have an economic incentive to see lower immigration in the future (something we seem to see at play in exit polling data).
So, I think the West absolutely could sustain much higher levels of immigration, if people didn't act like they actually do, particularly if the well-off didn't shift the costs primarily on to the lower classes while having most of the benefits accrue to them. But realistically, I don't think this sort of self-sacrifice is ever going to happen, which means ideal levels of migration are probably much lower. Particularly, I don't think it's at all beneficial for people in the developing world to have this issue leading to far-right regimes dominating the West.
Anyhow, we saw what happened when labor force growth was significantly constrained during the pandemic (in part due to a precipitous drop in migration, and also an exodus of older workers). Suddenly McDonald's was offering $18 an hour in rural areas, where that amount can actually make people homeowners. Real wage growth for the lower half of the income distribution was the best it had been in a half century. Meanwhile, in a radical reversal, inflation was actually making the top worse off.
And it's not surprise that during this period the NYT, WaPo, etc. were full of op-eds ringing the tocsin re inflation and bemoaning how the stimulus had "gone too far," and how we had a "massive labor shortage." Then, when things reversed to their usual trend, with the top capturing almost all real wage growth and the bottom half seeing their real wages actually fall again, you had op-eds bemoaning how "these stupid plebs don't get how good the Biden economy actually is and what a great soft landing we are experiencing." It's almost comic.
So of course people gravitate towards a dictator who claims to want to protect them from recalcitrant elites. This is how the monarchs gained their power in the early modern period, how the Roman Republic died, etc. It's a sort of historical cycle of sorts. And sometimes it even works out, e.g. it's hard to claim that Octavian wasn't a massive improvement over the self-serving nobility battling for their own prerogatives, but often it doesn't.
Edit: anyhow, my main point was simply that I wouldn't necessarily hold liberal cities up as shining examples of some "new 21st century economy." If America's largest cities are the model for that new economy, then Saudi Arabia or Qatar seem like they might be the paradigm for what that economy looks like writ large
:up:
Exactly. Trump is extremely incompetent and is hiring an entire clown car of other incompetents, so I imagine he will face another mid-term disaster. It's actually good that he won the popular vote, since he no longer has a personal incentive to try to further enshrine minority rule into our electoral system (nor do I think he cares too much about actually helping other "conservatives" win in the future).
Unfortunately, it's not prima facie clear that holding huge popularity contests is the best way to achieve good governance. Democracy is often held up as a "good in itself," and it well might be one to some extent, but it seems that its biggest benefit is that it gives leaders some incentive to make voters happy and removes particularly bad leaders on a regular basis. However, in the US case, the electoral system pretty much guarantees a two party system, which then leads to the possibility of voters continually shifting back and forth between parties to punish whoever is in control during any period of long term decline.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The urban-based economic engine of the 21st century will mainly benefit those with enough education and the right skills, which leaves out much of the urban poor, regardless of race, and most of those with the right skills and education still struggle with college costs, childcare and housing prices. I suspect most of the reason for the huge disparity in income in the cities is because, as the source of our economic engine, they just happen to be the places with the highest concentration of super-rich.
I dont think either the left or the right has a fix for this. There may be only patchwork, temporary forms of assistance. The left can offer a safety net and support for education, and some on the far left would offer policies like a sweeping redistribution of wealth and a guaranteed living income. But the right , given its focus on personal autonomy and character, would be reluctant to interfere with the wheels of capitalism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Now theres a nice unbiased view for ya. I especially like the phrase ruthlessly exploiting them. Thats a nice touch. My 102 year old father has 24 hour caregivers , who tend to be Nigerian, Philippine or from a Slavic country. Are they naive souls being ruthlessly exploited? Most of his helpers have been in this country for decades, are savvy about their options in the economy and what they can do to improve their career situation. If they are willing to take jobs that native-born residents reject, who is being exploited? When did your ancestors arrive in the U.S. and what jobs did they take that others didnt want? Was Ellis Island a plot to exploit naive foreigners?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My neighborhood in Chicago was deluged with Venezuelan refugees that the governor of Texas kindly bussed our way. The local police station and Armory were used to house them temporarily. They immediately began trying to find work , selling flowers and candy at intersections with their children in tow. It was a lot for our neighborhood to handle , but weve been here many times before. A substantial part of our community consists of Bosnian immigrants from that war, and Vietnamese boat people. We have seen them establish themselves over time and are now an integral part of our home, as our new Venezuelan arrivals will soon be. As the neighborhood becomes wealthier, we do see a slow reduction in transient hotels and homeless shelters, but we are still a supportive community who appreciates the need to continually open our arms to such persons. In fact I would say its one of the main reasons many of us choose to live here rather than in a suburb.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I noticed you said nothing about values systems and their relation to urban culture. Instead you focused on wealth disparity and defense. A simplistic calculus based on who has money and who doesnt isnt going to tell you anything useful about the social and political dynamics at play today in the era of Trumpism. This has much less to do with where the money is than it does with social values rooted in philosophical schemes. My concern is to see the range of related philosophical value systems concentrated in high density urban areas and universities thrive. I see the result of this election as demonstrating that a majority of Americans dont identify with these ways of thinking, which doesnt surprise me. It suggests to me that the cities need to form alliances to support each other in the absence of political support coming from the rest of the country. People like myself who derive great value from this urban culture will continue to be loyal to its ways regardless of the economic challenges.
Is there a connection between the philosophical value systems that have become dominant in universities and urban society and the great divide in wealth? Perhaps, in that the kinds of skills that the new social and bio-material-digital technologies brought into existence shut out the workers who in the past could make a living with a minimal skillset.
Yes, this line has been pedalled by folks like Charles Murray for the better part of a half century now. Any day now the sci-fi technology will finally develop and there will be no work for the undereducated masses! They most be content with whatever the "cognitive elite," see fit to bestow upon them via the dole, just like the Latins who were replaced by the "economic innovation" of industrial scale slavery and the superior economies of scale of the latifundium.
And yet, strangely, whenever these segments of the population see their incomes rise the crisis of "llabor shortage!" is proclaimed. These folks are superfluous to the economy of the future, nonetheless, millions more must come lest we face a "labor shortage." Curious.
Just like the folks in Southeast Asia wouldn't make our clothes for a quarter a day unless it was [I]better[/I], an [I] opportunity[/I] right? This is also a very old line. No doubt, they are savvy agents as well, so surely industrialists couldn't possibly be exploiting them.
The last time the US had immigration rates this high was the Guilded Age. Does this mean things were good then simply because desperate people kept being willing to come to the US?
Yet surely offering living conditions marginally preferable to being in the middle of a civil war doesn't amount to much. No?
Theyll keep coming until they are replaced by automation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the threat of actual civil war is more wishful thinking than a likely possibility. What is it you want? Who is it you are primarily pointing the finger of blame at? What are you proposing as a solution and which political entity or platform do you see as prepared to accomplish it?
I was referring to the migrants who are often fleeing civil wars, state collapse, or major depressions in other countries, not the West. That is, offering people marginally better conditions than Syria and Venezuela isn't exactly a high bar. At any rate, I wouldn't call such an outcome as respects the US or EU "wishful." More "disastrous."
Alliance against what? Surely not military, since these places have been denuded of almost all heavy industry, not to mention that they rely on other parts of the country for food and other resources, while their populations are also by far and away the least likely to say they would fight for their state.
Although, assuredly, if it came to that, we know who would end up being press ganged into doing the fighting. And I'm sure some technocratic case could be made for why it wouldn't make sense to throw the well-educated, with so much investment poured into them, into the infantry.
To be sure, there is much valuable in these urban centers and universities, but I think it's entirely off base to think they are superior in everything. There is also a lot that is critically wrong with these areas. As Musa al-Gharbi puts it, in terms I can certainly relate to:
For instance, these locales are among the worst preformers in terms of helping immigrants and their children attain eventual parity in income and education with natives. Maine, the Mountain states, etc. do this significantly better. Notably, the places where both migrants and natives are most likely to go from the bottom of the income distribution to the top are North Dakota counties, where the petrol boom has led to a chronic "labor shortage," which has enticed businesses to raise wages and working conditions.
We might also recall exactly where unrest related to routine police abuses has centered.
Ha, well at least: "they're welcome until a machine can do their job cheaper," is honest.
Looking at that giant ideology gap between young men and women in South Korea made me think of the 4B movement that started there around 2017-2018. I happened to read something about it the other day. The movement is supposedly getting some traction in the US since the election.
Pointing out that super-wealthy residents of New York are predominately of certain ethnic persuasions while their servants are of another, and that social mobility among immigrants is greater in South Dakota in the midst of an economic boom doesnt explain very much. The question is whether and how you can tie such facts to a liberal-progressive social value system. Yes, big cities have problems. New flash: they are noisy, dirty, congested, its expensive and tough to find parking, there are big rats. None of this reveals anything about why many like myself are passionate about the attitudes and ways of thinking (the philosophically informed strains of liberalism and progressivism) we find concentrated in urban centers, and why, in spite of the economic hardships imposed on many sub-communities that are a part of the urban fabric, we believe that these ways of thinking produce an approach to social relations, to caring about and supporting each other , that is more satisfying than the alternative we see being put into practice in places with more conservative values.
What Im saying is that the negatives youve been pointing out are not the direct result of the value systems I and other liberal urbanities embrace, but exist in spite of them, and are tangential to them. These problems may be a reason for a particular individual to decide to move to South Dakota or Maine, in spite of their fondness for what urban. liberalism stands for. Id liberal values are impetus r enough to them, they will find a way to remain connected to them by sacrificing certain comforts, or finding an affordable suburb or university town. You said you lived in New York, but Im getting the impression you didnt grow up in or near a big city. You write about it like a tourist rather than someone who is familiar with its social dynamics from the inside.
It seems like you don't really want to have a productive dialogue; so I am going to respectfully remove my hat from the pile. If you ever want to have an in-depth, productive conservation then let me know.
Yes, when you outlaw weapons (in general), you just make it harder for the good people to protect themselves. If I were in Great Britain, where they still have outlaws with plenty of guns, I would have to defend my family with a bat or a knife, at best, and end up with permanent brain damage at best. It's nonsense.
Sure, that's exactly what al-Gharbi and others have done. I don't think it is just some "unavoidable problem of urbanization," that the oh-so-progressive residents of the Upper West Side balked at unused hotels in their neighborhoods being used as shelters for Manhattan's homeless during the pandemic. It was the recurrent theme of "yes, progressivism... but not in my backyard." Instead, the homeless were concentrated in poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Nor is it an accident of urbanization when urban school districts have effectively re-segregated their school systems. That was an intentional policy choice. Likewise, an expanding racial wealth gap that eclipses that under Jim Crown (and that between Arabs and Jews in Israel) didn't "just happen by accident."
Likewise, "university towns" (e.g. Chapel Hill) might be plenty progressive, but the residents still often fight tooth and nail against any high-density housing being put up in their communities. Chapel Hill is a great example because, despite being overwhelmingly progressive, it still remains the case that majority black Durham happens to have a county-line (and thus a school district) that neatly wraps around the city limits, so that its students remain segregated from the children of the progressive elite across the border.
I think there is ample evidence to show this is not the case. There is a wealth of empirical evidence and case studies on the "not in my backyard phenomenon."
No, I grew up in a rust belt city, so the wealthy had already largely fled the city and settled in the surrounding environs. They were welcoming of new arrivals, so long as they stayed compressed in the city limits. And what a great welcome it was, routinely one of the top 10 worst violent crime rates in the US, where freshman classes at the high schools would dwindle by 75+% by graduation day.
But that's precisely al-Gharbi's thesis (and I'm glad we have someone to be our Ezekiel) Of course the urban elite are sincere. Championing the cause of the marginalized is how they justify they own wealth and status to themselves and society. And of course they see a sort of comradery with what is essentially their servant class. The European nobility felt the same way, even as they had that class continue to pay them an indemnity for "giving up their serfs" (i.e. those workers' parents and grandparents) into the first World War (a policy only stopped by revolution). They're their "benefactors," just a Gilded Age industrialists were able to convince themselves that they were the benefactors of their workers (even after events like Johnstown).
It's the same sort of moral degeneracy that convinces a wealthy middle-aged man who (pre)dates young single mothers who are desperate for support that he is an irresistible casanova.
You and I will never have a productive political dialogue. You propose invading India to force our way of life on them. You support a man you acknowledge tried to overthrow the government of the US. I'll look for ways to have better conversations with you in more philosophical discussions.
T Clark, all of the politicians that have been voted into the presidency have done wrong things. Biden has a history of racist remarks and policies (and most are on tape); Hillary had secret and top secret emails on her own private email server; and don't even get me started about Hillary and her husband together....
Trump, according to Pence, asked him to halt and illegitimize the votes (because, allegedly, they were fraudulent) and that is what you are referring to as "overthrowing the government". I do not support him doing what he did because I don't think there's reasonable evidence to support that it was fraudulent; and if it was, then it needs to be sent to the courts.
What I am trying to do is have a charitable conversation. The moment you try to whitewash your own political figures as angelic and your opponents as demonic is when there will be no productive conversations.
You and I don't have enough common ground to discuss this. As I noted, I'll look for non-political discussions that we can both participate in.
And it's noteworthy that the United States was willing to elect a black man, and not a black woman.
I don't have data, but that's my gut instinct -- there was a change and it was to a woman so vote for the penis-haver.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I want to thank you for pointing me to Al-Ghabis work. His thinking intersects some of my recent research, particularly the tension between personal and social autonomy and structural injustice. I want to offer a critique of his approach based on the relation between what I see as two main strands in his thinking. the first is the structural injustice theme.
Shaun Gallagher characterizes it this way:
Notice that for Gallagher structural injustice takes place in spite of the best intentions of individuals participating within institutional practices. Is Al-Ghabi not saying the same thing when he states that even when a persons heart and mind are in the right place, they can still be contributing to injustice? I dont think so, and this is where the second strand of his thinking comes into play. Al-Gharbi, unlike Gallagher, relies on the moralistic concept of hypocrisy to explain what he sees as a failure to practice what one preaches. He relies on the Gotcha moment when he asks the liberal do-gooder who contributes to all the rights causes, votes for all the right people, use all the politically correct vocabulary why they dont pay their housekeeper or Uber driver a higher tip , or why they take a NIMBY attitude toward the proposed mixed income development planned for their street. They want to look that person in the eye , see them squirm and hem and haw as they realize theyve been found out as morally culpable for choosing self-interest over altruism and, even worse, using their liberalism as a cover for it. What Al-Gharbi seems to have done is observe that, in spite of urban America being dominated by liberals, income inequality and racial segregation are as bad as ever. In searching for an explanation, he lands on good old fashioned selfishness and hypocrisy, and he dresses this up in the trendy vernacular of structural practices This mix of moralism and practice theory is a central feature of wokism, which after all has its origin in a religious context of spiritual enlightenment. Let me now critique this Sartrean bad faith notion from the vantage of practice-based accounts that I prefer. These accounts dont begin from an autonomous subject who choose their moral values and then attaches themselves to a community based on shared interests. Rather, subjectivities are constituted in their moral values as well as epistemic rationality through their interactions within an already existing community.
The bottom line is that the liberal who is also a NIMBY, and who is a meager tipper, and commits all the atrocities Al-Gharbi iterates, does practice what they preach. There is no hypocrisy involved. If you ask them and are willing or listen carefully to their reply , they will justify, on the basis of the discursive practices which they partially share with their community, the logic and morality of their position. Instead of looking for a moral Gotcha moment, what is needed is to offer the person whose actions one disagrees with an opportunity to understand an alternative set of practices, a new interpretive rationality.
But one has to appreciate what one is asking here. Changing a deeply enmeshed perspective is akin to changing religious doctrine. It is easy for Al-Gharbi, because he has decided in advance what the correct moral stance is (elimination of racial segregation and income inequality) and why people fail to live up to his correct standards (they are hypocrites who fail to practice what they preach because they choose self-interest over altruism).
Al-Ghabis selfishness vs giving binary misses the fact that the self is not a fortress originally walled off from the world , the moral task being to break down the wall. The self is a social construct, a product of discursive and material
practices and interactions. Our limits of compassion and altruism are not a function of Al-Ghabis fortress self but our inability to make intelligible and relatable the practices of those who are too Other. Either they must find a way to bridge the gap between their ways and those of our group, or we must find a way re-configure our own system of practices to make those Others recognizable to us. Youll notice that NIMBYism doesnt exist in a normal family. Their backyard, if they have one, is filled with their childrens toys and swingset. Is this because of a moral choice on the part of the parent to be giving rather than selfish toward their children? If it is in our self-interest to be giving toward our children, our spouse, our friends, this is certainly not hypocrisy. Practice theories show that it is not an act of moral will that determines our generosity, or lack thereof, toward those different than ourselves, as though it were as obvious as Al-Gharbi wants us to think it is what constitutes racism , social injustice, unfair inequality, and who is to blame for it.
By making moral choice the kingpin of his approach, he marginalizes the role of discursive practices in its shaping of ethical and rational action to a peripheral status. As a result, he takes the cause of the injustices he rails against out of the historical contexts of the worldviews which are needed to make sense of them. So rather than seeing differences in how Otherness is perceived between social conservatives like J.D. Vance (whose focus is on individual character and personal responsibility due to his allegiance to the Enlightnement thinking of the autonomous self) and liberals who understand that it takes a village as decisive for their actions, Al-Ghabi personalizes the issue. There just happen happen to be a large number of selfish hypocrites concentrated in big cities who wont share. their toys. Meanwhile, one can find many social conservatives in small towns who are generous and who do all kinds of wonderful
things for Others.
I should point out that within the urban blue camp there is a whole spectrum of political philosophies , which I tend to see in developmental terms, ranging from old-style MLK or Obama-type liberalism, to Marxism , Critical theory , critical race theory and intersectionality, to postmodernism. The wealthy liberal lawyers and businessmen of the Upper West Side are overwhelmingly of the MLKObama type, which means they are only supportive of a limited degree of wealth redistribution. I see Al-Ghabis approach as a bit to the left of old-school liberalism within this spectrum. It seems to me the main way in which his thinking distinguishes itself from the old left is that he is more comfortable with considerable wealth redistribution.
Where is the connection with human nature? It would be more convincing to say that it has to do with being. Nobody would disagree that it take means or substance to be. You would agree that being in actuality is not always positive. Sometimes we must acknowledge that harm must come to others as a formal cost of being, some things must be taken away from others, and some things that another may not want must occur in addition to their opposites. It is recalcitrant to deny this in hopes of defending the right not to bear it or be responsible for it.
If you can face it, this is a big part of what is disgusting about the behaviour of the extreme moralists you describe. They pay no attention to marginal groups who bear the weight that is inconvenient to see in their utilitarian principle. It is all about rallying the agnostic and apathetic to destroy enemies. It almost never has anything to do with the moral topics or premises themselves, because the claims are always too simplistic and one-sided.
This is a strawman. For one thing, a major focus of Al-Ghabi is the way in which elites choose to [I]personally[/I] identify as "oppressed and marginalized," and this seems much harder to explain in terms of systemic constraints, particularly because it is a relatively recent phenomenon.
This is also a strawman of my position, because of course I acknowledge that even elites are bound to and by the very systems that give them their status. I have been commenting on what the American urban [I] system[/I] produces. Should people be morally outraged by such a system? Sure, just as reformers were rightfully outraged over the excesses of the Gilded Age, slavery, etc.
American slave owners were surely also part of a system; that doesn't eliminate all of their moral culpability. And at any rate, even if it did and no [I]individual[/I] slave owner bore any responsibility for the practice of slavery, it would still be the case that the [I]system[/I] of hereditary chattel slavery in the US was morally abhorrent and in need of dramatic change. Likewise too for the Holocaust or the Holodomor. One doesn't need to embrace "Sartrean bad faith" to think these sorts of systemic events have moral valance. And if the outliers have moral valance, so to do the less outrageous cases of the Gilded Age or our new Guilded Age.
You've set up a false dichotomy where one either acknowledges systematic constraints (something Al-Ghabi certainly does) or gives systematic issues moral weight, but never both. Yet both are relevant. Those who campaigned to end slavery, serfdom, child labor, Jim Crow, etc. did so specifically because they saw them as moral issues, and they were successful, at least in part, because they eventually convinced others that their moral stance was correct.
The strawman lies in trying to reduce the entire project to a "gotcha." It isn't. If the books and scholarship that helped develop the ground for the "Great Awokening," and what has become the mainstream consensus in urban elite circles (e.g. Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow") have value, then surely a study of, and reflection on, how this social movement has actually pursued its stated goals is just as worthwhile.
But that wasn't even my original point. My original point was that I wouldn't hold up America's urban centers as a shining example of what the future ought to be, precisely because they seem to generate a social structure more akin to Saudi Arabia or Qatar than the what the leadership class actually wants. Yet those states, despite their tremendous wealth, don't represent good models. They are inherently unstable (for instance, most of America's major urban centers erupted into widespread riots not all that long ago), so even if GDP growth and technological innovation were our sole criteria they would have notable flaws. And I would argue that these systems make even the elites in those societies less free. Nor are people entirely constrained by systems. Even a member of a ethnocentric, jingoistic bronze age priesthood could remark of his own ethnic group in the 6th century BC: "the people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice" (Ezekiel 22:29, and note that this is not "Enlightenment individualism," the blame and punishment falls on the corporate whole precisely because society acts as a whole)
No doubt, institutions can constrain people, but people can (and often do) also change institutions, which is why it is hardly off base to point out cases where goals and actual policy are completely at odds. In particular, it's relevant when discussing why establishment parties in the West keep losing elections, particularly in cases where the populist right fields candidates with glaring problems.
You wrote:
Quoting kudos
I responded:
Quoting T Clark
The fact that living life unavoidably brings us into conflict with other people has nothing to do with "moral indecency" or a "darker side." It's how we handle that conflict that matters.
Yeah - this view is wild to me. Sanders is too far left damn,,,
Sanders would fit into right wing political parties in Europe. The American people must somehow not want healthcare and social services.
Or people in positions of relative privilege, don't want to sacrifice a bit of income, for a better country...
Thats it, really. Its strange because theyve come to be convinced that these services, which other countries have, is unaffordable, or will raise taxes, or both. Plus stuff about shrinking government and pulling yourself by your bootstraps. All old, tired, evidence-free reasoning.
In the richest country on earth, its scandalous that we dont have the same healthcare as Britain or Canada.
:100:
Well.
Let's hope we make it out alive during these 4 years. Maybe we will have a good strategy by then.
A public option for healthcare polls decently well (i.e. modest majority support, and support amongst a sizable proportion of Republican voters as well). The problem is that the US electoral system is pretty much set up so as to result in the election of representatives who are significantly more radical than the median voter, while major reforms also must pass the Senate, where representation not proportional, and generally must pass with 60 votes.
This could be fixed of course, in a variety of ways (e.g. fixing gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, open primaries, making it easier to vote, particularly in primaries, abolishing the Senate, etc.). The problem is that the candidates who win in the current system are not the type of candidates who are likely to win in a system that more closely aligns to median preferences, so they have very little incentive to push for such changes. Not that this would fix everything, far from it, because people would still be invested in the "culture war" as a new sort of religion of sorts, but it might fix a lot of issues.
We are prone to sinning (whatever the list of sins may contain). Many nice people--decent, honest, cooperative, civiic minded--have people "chained to the walls in the dungeons of their mind". I've had to expand dungeon space at times, convert it to archival storage at other times. There's nobody down there right now. Over time the former inhabitants shriveled, dried up, crumbled, and blew away. Various science fiction and phantasy novels, plots, and characters (like from Herbert and Tolkien) were moved into that space.
Quoting kudos
A New York Times editorialist said that "Democrats must learn to say no." Some people's interests have to be turned aside. Should the public be asked to pay for prisoners' and immigrants' "gender affirming" therapy and surgery? It may be a burning issue for several hundred or a couple thousand individuals, but elevating it to a public policy was a mistake. There are millions of illegal immigrants in the US. I don't think Trump will have the wherewithal to round up all of them and send them back. But they aren't entitled to be here. Admitting that isn't xenophobia or racism.
Trump wants to shrink government. Since WWII, the percent of citizens who work for the government has fallen. The population has increased by roughly 200 million people over that time. Cutting the budget by 1/3 (Musk's plan) will be impossible (and is a very bad idea) because most government programs have important constituencies within every congressional district.
We may not have the most equitable health care system; we may have the most expensive health care system; our health care system leaves out some people. With careless management it could get a lot worse.
Yes, the 60 votes rule is now a serious problem. I don't know what it will take to get the Constitution amended again. I don't quite follow what you mean by "more radical". Do you mean politicians who promise public good but then don't deliver?
I remember who good Palin did when they tried ranked choice voting in Alaska. Great stuff. I agree with what you list, for sure, those would be welcome changes. I also assume overturning Citizens United would be good - but with this Supreme Court, it's not happening.
As for the Culture War. Yeah. That's a problem. Or better, it is presented as a bigger problem instead of focusing on much more serious stuff: destruction of the Earth's climate, raising inequality, etc.
That one is also difficult to navigate.
Well, the 60 vote threshold to remove the filibuster doesn't require a constitutional amendment. It can be done with a simple majority. It's a very long standing Senate rule, but the Senate can amend its own rules (with a 2/3rds vote; however through a convoluted process you can curtail the filibuster, Rule 22, by creating a new "precedent," with a majority).
The reason it isn't changed is because control of the Senate flips often, and each party knows that it will eventually be out of power and doesn't want to be steamrolled by a simple majority. Nor do they want to be forced to stand up to their own party to prevent stupid but popular votes from passing. For example, Republicans tried to force Democrats to actually take a vote on the wholesale abolishment of ICE (something more radical members had submitted). But obviously completely abolishing your immigrations and customs agency rather than reforming it is idiocy, and so the Democratic leadership was almost put in the position of having to vote down their own bill, angering their base.
And honestly, this isn't necessarily bad thinking when you consider some particularly dangerous policies that have been recommended, such as Trump's push to make almost all federal employees with any decision making authority political appointees who can be fired based purely on political loyalty. This would be an unmitigated disaster, easily the most damaging policy proposed in recent memory. Many Republicans know this is idiocy, and the filibuster keeps them from having to actively switch sides to vote against it.
In order to be a candidate in a general election you need to win your party's primary. Primaries have much lower turnout. Many people don't even know they are going on. In many states, you need to have become a declared member of either party to vote in that party's primary. This means that the people who vote in primaries tend to be:
-older
-wealthier; and
-more ideologically motivated
than the general electorate. Think about it, who is going to get themselves to the polls in the spring or winter, long before the general election (particularly for off years when there is no presidential race and much less media buzz)? Who is going to want to actively declare themselves as a member of either party? On average, these people tend to be more ideologically motivated.
So, by the time the general electorate votes, they have already had their options picked by a group that tends to have different policy priorities. Add in gerrymandering and you tend to get representative who are both significantly more liberal and more conservative than the median voter. And this of course makes compromise more difficult.
And they all do it for about half what it costs here.
Ah sure. I mean the way I see it, is that Republicans keep going further to the right (than almost any other developed country on Earth) dragging Dems to the right as well. Look at what happened with Build Back Better, Sinema and Manchin gutted it. So, can the 60 rule be changed or modified? I think Dems might want to consider this, the Republicans have too much influence.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I see your point. I agree with a good deal of it. But outside of the Culture War stuff (and now immigration), I don't see how actual Republican policy would appeal to anyone other than the 1%. It's just deregulation and tax cuts, but they then add abortion and minority rights, etc., as the red herring that's how they get votes. I think those who profit from the Republicans know this, hardcore followers and more casuals too.
With Dems it's somewhat different. I mean compare them to what FDR did, it's hard to believe they even have the same name. I believe a populist Sanders social-lefty message would resonate with a lot of people. By the time it reaches the mainstream (the National stage), then you get issues about deficit and political feasibility thrown in to make the whole platform sound like Soviet Russia.
If it's how we handle that conflict that matters, then you must agree that the two have something to do with one another. Otherwise, how could it matter at all? Have you ever heard of a criminal who did not in some heinous or indecent manner have justification in their mind.
"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons."
From The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir and Karl Koch)
Not sure what you mean about the second part. However, I blame Twitter most of all for the downturn against the left wing. The effect of it has been widespread polarization and reductivism. Beforehand the left wing had common sense.
"Moral indecency" and "darker side" are not terms, or the kinds of terms, I use to describe human behavior. That's what I mean when I say you and I have a different understanding of human nature.
You're right that those terms were put sort of bluntly though, it was a failed attempt at being whimsical and humourous.
I have a different take on morality than others I have discussed it with here on the forum. Please believe I am not joking or being sarcastic when I say I do not accept "universal determinations of evil and bad 'in-themselves.'" For me, morality is the set of rules I use for my own behavior. I don't apply those rules to others. Rules that apply to people in general, myself and others, I call social control. They are the rules society at all scales applies to promote acceptable behavior and prevent disruptive or harmful behavior.
I don't think a more detailed discussion of this issue is appropriate here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In order to be outraged by the excesses of a system like slavery, one has to be positioned within an alternative system of intelligibility. Most adherents of slavery, including prominent philosophers, were convinced it was morally justified, and this wasnt simply self-serving. This doesnt mean a critique couldnt arise from within the system of thought that justified slavery, but it would consist of reform within this system rather than an overthrow of it. Those advocating for such reforms generally agreed with the overall premise concerning the intellectual inferiority of slaves. To overthrow the system one needed to replace it with a way of thinking according to which whatever differences separated slaves from their owners did not indicate any innate traits marking them as less than completely human.
The issue of structural injustice arises in the context of the effect the perpetuation of the system has on reinforcing its grounding assumptions. If the result of treating a group of people as inferior and not fit to be integrated into society is to prevent them from attaining the very privileges that would allow the dominant society to recognize them as equals ( access to education and assimilation into the fabric of the community) , this will perpetuate the stereotypes even if its unintentional.
With respect to old-line liberal values among the urban elite, a critique from within this system would advocate for reforms along the lines of an increase in the minimum wage and more hiring quotas. But a critique capable of overthrowing this system would have to question the very assumptions grounding it , such as Lyotards notion of the differend, which asserts that there are certain wrongs that cannot be rectified within the terms of language set by a system that assumes a level playing field, such as Rawlss veil of ignorance. Marginalized groups often end up being excluded from the terms of that level playing field, and more reform just perpetuates this exclusionary state of affairs. But what if all the wealthy power brokers in places like New York bought into Lyotards value system rather than old-style liberalism?
And by that I dont mean simply pay it lip service, because if you understand how a value system operates, to be ensconced within it is to rely on it to make your world intelligible from both a rational and a moral perspective. I dont think such an overthrow would solve the wealth inequality or racial segregation issue although it would make some progress in that direction. It would more likely shift the bounds of the issue from one of racial identity and class differences to one of philosophical value system. Adherents of different value systems speak different languages and belong to different cultures. Highly educated BLM activists, while aiming their rhetoric at residents of poor black communities, were really speaking to other academics, and the practical consequences of their ideas could be located in the context of the academic and skilled workplace environments in which they could apply these ideas to improve interactions with their colleagues.
Meanwhile, little by little residents of poor back communities, being mostly socially conservative rather than the BLM progressives who advocate in their name, are moving into the Republican party.
What issue? Am I making you uncomfortable? Your post reads like a rebuttal, but actually you are conveying my point better than I could have done myself.
There is something to be said for the argument that the U.S. is more oligarchy than democracy:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, Freedom and Representation, in Vices, Virtues, and Consequences, pp. 204-7
My personal understanding of morality.
Quoting kudos
We use different language, so I guess I misunderstood.
One can reasonably blame Twitter, and several other social media sites, for animosity towards the left and for polarization. The algorithms encourage whatever gains the most eyeballs (to sell to advertisers) something that quiet, reasoned discourse doesn't do. And, of course, people respond to outrage by supplying more fodder to feed the hungry algorithms.
As a longtime midwestern leftist, I have never found most fellow midwesterners all that receptive to leftist ideas. It isn't that "the people" are all troglodytes or rednecks. Most people just hold mainstream values, which some leftists sneer at. Socialism (as they misunderstand it) just isn't attractive for most people. Their family is the center of their lives; they're not interested in radical social experiments. Bread and butter issues (like whether they can afford good bread, meat, milk, fruits and vegetables, clothing, transportation, health care, and all that) are the most important thing to we working people, and we are roughly 90% of the population.
Senator Sanders was emphatic that the people Democrats need to serve are working class people--none of whom, by definition, belong to an 'elite'. Address and legislate working class concerns--things like a $17 federal minimum wage; inflation (to which people living paycheck to paycheck are very sensitive); the high cost of renting or buying a home; and so on.
Men, women, straights, GLBT, hispanics, asians, whites, Blacks, etc. are almost all working class. Yes, the working class has some layering by wealth, but as a group, none of us has much wealth. As a group, we have to get a regularly and reliable paycheck to make ends meet. That's what Democrats need to focus on--so say Bernie and me.
Quoting BC
Wiith some exceptions.
Even better - let's find non-political philosophical questions to discuss.
Minnesota and North Dakota also had socialists in government. The Farmer Labor Party in MN was leftist. (They merged into the present Democratic Farmer Labor Party) which alternates with Republicans for political control.)
Minneapolis was home to several small socialist parties between the 1960s and 1990s--emphasis on 'small'.
I wish socialist political activism was present and capable of electoral success, but at this point, it is not. And despite the presence of active socialist politics in the past, midwesterners are not now receptive to socialist politics, at least in my experience,. Still, there is a strong liberal politics which is worth having.
But instead, the Dems pick problems most people dont really face everyday (LGBTQ issues, global environment issues, class issues, race issues), and they create solutions that are unreasonable. When it comes to actual solutions, the Dems mostly convert one problem into two other problems, occasionally dont impact the problem at all, and less occasionally do some good. So when they pick a problem most dont care a lot about, they look terrible. They need to identify what the real issues are that federal government has some real control over.
One major issue I see keeping people apart is that conservatives have to confess their policy positions and apologize for having them, if progressives will even entertain a discussion. Conservatives have to answer questions like do you support white nationalism? And do you hate immigrants, women and LGBTQ?
Those questions have nothing to do with most conservative policies. But for some reason, if you support republicans, you must be a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, heartless, greedy pig. And no honest conversation can be had if the repub doesnt first confess these truths and apologize for them.
And then progressives dont believe the answers when the conservative says no to all of them. Dems are as conspiratorial as the worst maga election and vaccine deniers. They find dog whistles everywhere and never take things conservatives say for their face value.
(Here is a tip - Maga has no depth - it is all face value - and the Dems refuse to see this. That is what populism is - taking the populace at face value. The naive want to have the naive discussions.)
Progressives in the media have made it this way. It started in the 60s. Progressive voices became so loud and were supported so uniformly in all forms of media (movies, TV, news, print) and college/education, now, anything that opposes progressive speech and liberal thinking is seen as only coming from a bad, backwards place. Public speech has now all become virtue signaling political correctness, and the Dems made it this way.
Dems cant even debate differences of opinion with each other anymore.
So if a Republican wants to talk to a Dem, he or she needs to apologize for all of the wrong words they will use, and apologize for having ideas that conflict with the prevailing wisdom of the brilliant media and college professors.
Believe it or not, the vast vast majority of republicans, like the vast majority of human beings, are not racist. Its unfortunately true and the Dems dont want to believe that they might be the ones fomenting racism. Someone who thinks the phrase build a border wall is racist may have their own issues with race, and may be seeking a different conversation than border policy.
We all hate racism. It doesnt have to be part of every discussion.
BTW, Hate and racism have a much cozier home in a party that hates white, patriarchal, colonizing profiteers. A basis for hating a whole group of people based on nothing to do with individual blame but merely because of their membership in a group exists to a much much greater degree in the Dem party (lots of groups of people the Dems sanction hating - there is no reason for a democrat to even speak with someone who likes being white, or a white male, or depending on the conversation any male, or a capitalist big business owner, or a Christian gun owner - none of these groups really deserve a fair hearing, the dems have heard enough from such people back in the 50s and have moved on, progressed beyond all of those deplorable people.)
So conversations between progressives and conservatives never really happen - they each talk about different things and hurl their insults over each others walls and never hear each other or see each other at all.
For instance, to the average Repub, the issue at the border has nothing to do with the nationality of the people on the other side of the border. No conservative republican cares where you are from (including Trump); if you want to respect Americas laws, apply and enter the country legally, great, welcome aboard from wherever you are from. The border issue is simple: to say America and mean it, you need a border so you can point on a map to what you mean. We need a border first to be the country everyone can find on a map so they can leave their countrys borders and come here for a better life. We need to build a better America so that when they cross the border they find the hope they seek. Borders are real and matter for the sake of Americans and the rest of the world. Race and nationality of an individual person has nothing to do with this issue, save for one nationality - American - which nationality only exists inside a border (once there is a border). Republican policy at the border is for the sake of people of ALL nationalities creeds and colors who are legally American.
This a reasonable, debatable position. There is much to say in support and in opposition to this that need never use the word race. Its insulting and betrays weak analysis to raise race with every issue.
Questions like: why do you only want to help the rich while exploiting the poor? Many poor people now see through this loaded question in all its forms in the media. People registered dem and repub, rich and poor, actually think that if they can make some of their own money, save to build their own security, they can freely create whatever society they want here in America, already. They dont need or want government to figure out what bathroom signs should look like, or how many Asians or women are on boards of directors. At least not now, when they cant save any money at all. They want to be able to run their own lives and communities.
The biggest divide between Dems and (real) Repubs is over the size and role of the federal government. Repubs are supposed to create results for people by limiting the role of federal government to its strengths (national security, foreign policy and trade, interstate issues) and cutting it down to the minimum size necessary (lower taxes) to address those limited things. Repubs try to create conditions within which people can identify and solve their own problems, not tell them what the problem is and take their money to solve it for them. Dems think the feds in Washington will be better suited to tell people in a small town in Wyoming and big city New York, and the big corporations and the mom and pop business what they need, how to get it and how much it should cost, and what is good for their business and what is good in the public square. And that has never worked once in 100 years.
The Dems over-promise and under deliver, in my view, because government is inefficient and will never provide the resources to improve society. Its a necessary evil, not suited to knowing and managing what people need.
Progressivism really is like a secular religion, complete with the Paradise of Power to the People through Big Brother Federal Government. Republicans are the party of the immoral, selfish and stupid. Dems are the party of the morally upright, the community based, and the brilliant thinkers. Yet they still lose. Maybe they dont understand anything at all about the people who didnt vote for them. And God forbid, maybe their ability to identify and solve national problems arent as brilliant as they thought. Maybe the poor uneducated white man has a good idea once in a while.
My question is, with the media and higher education deeply in the back-pocket of progressive supporting Dems, why is it Dems could possibly lose any election? How could anyone, let alone a whole country, elect a racist, sexist, raping, felon nazi (all synonyms for Trump) if the dems are really for the people at all? Its because Dems take the people for granted, and misjudge them. And instead of focusing on the people, theyve given up on the peoples ability to help themselves, they dont even want people to help themselves, and think the answer to any problem might somehow magically be found in bigger government dominance of all facets of life, as if there is one way people should be, as if the problems Dems see as priority are the biggest problems we all must see, as if the solutions they devise to address these problems are the only way.
It seems rather contemptuous of religion to reduce it to mere political and social philosophy.
Quoting Shawn
Nope.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141
Poisoning the blood? Where have we heard that before...If all these illegal immigrants were lily white people from Norway, you think you'd be hearing that kind of rhetoric from Trump? And his supporters love it. And the non-racist Republicans turn a blind eye to it. That's just Trump being Trump. Trump has dinner with Nick Fuentes and there's not a peep of protest from MAGA world. They like it. That's a feature, not a bug.
A large segment of Republicans is incredibly racist.
Except that Hillary Clinton, an unimaginable hag of a woman, won the popular vote by a comfortable margin in 2016. But keep coping, I suppose..
Look who she ran against. If she had been a white male, she would have clobbered Trump. Women and minorities are underrepresented in all aspects of leadership in this country. A minority woman running for president is like a sprinter starting 20 yards behind the starting lining. You don't live in this country, do you?
I agree with everything you write but with a note. We got where we are today because of the Republicans. They have worked for more than 50 years to drive Americans apart from each other and it works, politically, but doesn't work in terms of good governance, in which they have little interest. In line with the principles on which you and I agree, I don't bring that up in discussions when I'm trying to be conciliatory. The Republicans have broken it. It's up to the Democrats to fix it.
Like I said, conservatives have to confess their evil, lying hearts before anyone who is reasonable would believe an honest dialogue on the issues. Racist, facist pigs.
If I was using blood as an analogy about the border, instead of the shameful shit Trump says, Id say America is wounded, bleeding at the border, and hurting Mexico, the Mexican people, and the rest of the world in the process. And America can fix its own bleeding if it really wanted to, but instead it just continues bleeding. Americas border policy is weakening itself, and poisoning the rest of the world.
But thats all more political headline grabbing bullshit metaphor, poisoning the blood of actual discussions Dems should be having and positions they should be articulating.
Quoting RogueAI
Right. Foregone conclusion. No use talking with a racist. All smart people agree on that, right?
But then, how can the Dems talk with Republicans and win them over, and win elections, if all those Repubs are not worthy of any human interaction?
Maybe jumping right into youre a racist in conversations isnt the best approach? I mean, we all know already, racism has become a feature of the Republican. The media is doing a great job with that. So is that it? Conversation on the merits of any issue is over? Trump only dog-whistles? Full stop?
I wonder if there are a few Repubs who arent racist, who find racism immoral. Unfortunately, Im just as sure theres a large segment of Democrats who are incredibly racist as well. So maybe racism grinding every issue into a food fight isnt productive of expanding a Dem base?
[b]Dems should learn how to express what they want on the border and debate it with Repubs. Thats my point. So do we need an organized border, or not? Dems say yes and Dems say no (sometimes, its the same Dem). Which is it?
Any clear answer to that question will help the Dems. But Dems have trouble talking about the border for some reason. I dont see why they cant draw a clear line at the border like they can draw a clear line around a large segment of Republicans as racists.[/b].
The last (and only) time US had migration levels (i.e. share of the population that is foreign born, or, alternatively, share that is either foreign born or has at least one foreign born parent) this high was was in the early 20th century. Then, the migrants were overwhelmingly from Europe, particularly Germany, Ireland, Italy, and later Eastern/Central Europe. The same sort of rhetoric prevailed then and massive draconian restrictions were put in place on migration that were designed specifically to not only disallow non-European migration, but also migration from much of Europe (particularly non-Protestant regions).
Migration status became a less salient issue in the years that followed due to both vastly curtailed migration and the fact that the US attracted fewer migrants after it blew up its own (and the world's) economy in the Great Depression. By the time debate on reopening migration occured migration levels had been very low for a long time and migrants had been increasingly assimilated, with this being helped along by the shared experience of WWII and the mass conscription it involved.
See:
Pew, hardly a far-right organization, did a retrospective on the effects of the 1965 migration reforms in the mid-2010s. The shift had brought migration rates on par with the early 20th century, with close to 1 in every 8 residents being foreign born and 1 in 4 being either foreign born or having at least one foreign parent. These figures can shift a bit depending on if undocumented immigrants are counted and how they are counted since they represent a significant proportion of the population, but there are large variances is estimates of the size of this population. The change is not small, IIRC, Pew estimates that the US population would be around 270 million without the reforms, as opposed to around 335 million. You have similar shifts in Europe, where Europeans have been projected to become minorities in many of the larger economies by the end of the century since at least 2000 (and have become minorities in urban hubs already).
This creates political challenges, not only because of the effects on the labor market, housing market, inequality, etc., and the displacement issues often highlighted in debates on "gentrification," but also because there is a large difference between the age distributions of the populations. For an example, during the height of the BLM protests there were student/parent protests over the fact that the teaching staff of Worcester, Massachusetts was largely white, while the students are largely Hispanic. But, one of the obvious reasons for this is that the median age for Hispanics in the region was 20, too young to have completed college, a prerequisite for being a teacher, versus over 40 for white residents. Much could be said on this, but it just highlights the age differences.
Anyhow, this plays into tensions over immigration because different age groups also often have very different priorities and time horizons. This sort of difference is at play in Europe as well. So you get a transference of intergenerational conflict into ethnic terms, and this is particularly acute if you have surging senior benefits crowding out future investment. You end up with a far more diverse working population seeing investment for their children crowded out by a significantly older native population that also holds most of the wealth.
So, I think the tensions are unfortunately predictable, but they are made more acute by the age gap, and they have been managed poorly in terms of messaging (xenophobic rants versus the idea that all debate on migration is inherently racist).
You can see the latter problem pretty clearly in the use of the "Great Replacement," narrative. To be sure, there are extremely racist, right wing fever dream versions of this narrative where "the Jews" have organized it as a means of "white genocide." But the general line that Democrats look at migration as a boon because they see it a way to shift demographics in favor of their party is hardly conspiratorial. I first heard this line when I was working for Democratic campaigns. The idea that "Texas will keep becoming more Latino, tipping it blue, and then the Presidency will be assured prepetuity," is an idea you can find all over progressive political opinion pieces in the last thirty years. And there are critiques of such thinking that aren't racist.
It also seems wrong. Even as a teenager I had the thought that if Hispanics grow up in the US they will end up having political opinions in line with the US average, which means about an even split between the parties (or even in favor of the GOP given the states where Hispanic immigration is highest). And this seems to be at least partially vindicated by Trump winning a majority of Hispanic men over, and the shift in his favor across urban centers in the Northeast (but still losing by landslide margins, just 30/70 instead of 20/80 in 2016 and 2020). Anyhow, I think the decision to generally frame the discussion in terms of the most abhorrent narratives is actually a disservice to liberal political ambitions.
Does Gopnik give any examples of the economies "untouched by neoliberalism?" The US maintains UBI and universal healthcare for its seniors, but the inability of neoliberal reformers to roll back popular entitlements doesn't mean they haven't radically altered other areas. European states with strong welfare states have still seen the off-shoring of their industry, sea change reforms in migration (Japan would be a good counterexample comparison here), a decline in the political influence of unions, and the influence of trade agreements that have radically altered the legal framework for businesses in line with neoliberal preferences. The way the Eurozone operates would be another example, or how economic policy intersects with policy on Russia.
That is true, but that is not where Trump and MAGA are now. Trump has made it clear he does not like brown and black people. They eat pets. They're rapists. They're from shithole countries. They're vermin, poisoning our blood.
Also: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/12/577673191/trump-wishes-we-had-more-immigrants-from-norway-turns-out-we-once-did
Might this simply have to do with the fact that most immigrants no longer come from Europe? It's fairly easy to find many of the charges laid against Syrian and African refugees and immigrants in 2015 now being leveled against Ukrainian refugees. And in extreme far-right spaces, rants against "Slavic subhumans," could be copied and pasted right from Nazi Eastern Front political orders of the day.
No doubt, racism undergirds much of these sentiments, but they are generally explicitly (and not always implausibly) formulated in cultural terms, not in racial terms. And research shows that conservatives actually have a marked bias in [I]favor[/I] of minorities who adopt conservative political positions, perhaps because supporting them helps alleviate cognitive dissonance over claims of bias.
I don't think "self-hatred," is going to be a good way to explain Trump winning the majority of Latino men at any rate.
My thoughts are that the salience of group identity can shift dramatically based on other cultural and economic conditions. This is how you get tribal/ethnic identities in the Middle East taking center stage in regions where a single unified rule has made such identities more ancillary for long stretches of history. And people often shift the identities they most embrace, for example elevating their religious identity over their ethnic identity. You see this a lot, particularly with more conservative African and Latin American migrants, who proclaim that they are "Christians first." Broad conservative alignment with Arab Christian groups is an example here.
This is actually a reason why in general the center left has lost to populism. Or anti-elitist demagogues, which would be more accurate. Not just the Democrats in the US.
Real issues if the Democratic Party really wants to reform.
- Hell with the old octogenarian politicians. Party leadership should be not the age of retired people and the top leadership should be under 50. You can have capable old dogs only in the background and giving up their seats to new generations (to fuck it up, but it's the thought that counts). Octogenarian leadership is like the nearly dead leadership of the Soviet Union waving to the people on the Parade on the Red Square. That's the Dems now!
- Hell with the superdelegates system and lobby groups. That's what Americans really hate. After Trump, Americans truly believe in the "primaries" system and that the parties are so fucking democratic, that new people really can come up even if at odds with the party establishment. If they elect someone like Bernie, then go with Bernie. And if the Bernie totally crashes against a Republican nominee, then that is reality.
- Hell with the "it's their turn" thinking. The party shouldn't be so complacent to have this idea of politicians just waiting for "their turn" like Biden ...or Harris. The idea not to have a primary for the replacement of the totally unfit Biden is the reason why Democrats lost.
- Hell with criticizing of the voters! Oh, they were SO STUPID to believe Trump. Well, yes, many didn't have a better option. Stop believing in the idea that people will vote for you "because the other option is so bad". No, you are not good enough then. If an anti-elitist populist win your supporters vote, it's not the populists or the voters themselves that are the problem, it's fucking you that is the problem then.
- Hell with the mediocre and lame attitude. Be angry.
Everybody's been angry for the past 10 years. Look how well that's turned out.
Not the democratic party leadership. They haven't been angry. Yes, only about Trump have they been angry, but not about how things are.
One has to understand that DNC is now in the opposition where the ruling party has the keys to everything. Do you think Trump will really give a thought on how the GOP wins after him?
Trump has won because his supporters have been these despised underdogs. The laughs and the ridicule that Trump got made him from irrelevant to relevant. That has given them the passion that the Dems have lacked. That first the supporters of the Dems had to go with the line that Biden is perfectly capable of another four years, then it's just announced that Kamala is the candidate. You think that empowers the supporters, get's them to be enthusiastic? Hell no.
I tried to get out of this discussion once. Or was it twice? So here we go again. Im all done.
Well, your proof of the apathy in the Dems camp.
No, but I think they swallowed a lot of abuse to keep a woman out of the Whitehouse.
And yet the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, just resigned over his support for Tucker's interview of Fuentes. This bodes ill for your theory. Now that Republicans are learning who Fuentes is, we are seeing lots of opposition.
We are seeing lots of opposition from (what MAGA would call) RINO squishes. Has Trump or Vance weighed in on this?
I mean, Trump and Tucker hate each other; Vance and Fuentes hate each other; Fuentes hates Trump; and Trump probably does not even remember who Fuentes is. So it would be odd to see the Tucker-Fuentes alliance as MAGA-backed. <Here> is Vance on Fuentes.
Sure, but what are Vance and Trump saying about this latest Heritage scandal or about Tucker hosting Nick Fuentes? Nothing. And Trump runs his mouth about everything. So, if the leader of the GOP can't be bothered to talk about it, it's not a big deal. Or at least that's the message the WH is sending: much ado about nothing.
I would not vote for a female president in the primary, because that is not my image of the president I want. I like traditional values that go with my fantasy about being American. I want a president and a first lady who have charisma like Jack and Jacky Kennedy. Calling them our Camelot says a lot about how we felt, and some of us would love to have that back. It went with "Don't ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country". John (Jack) Kennedy.
Those words made us feel important and gave us a sense of purpose, and we felt empowered to make our nation great. We, the people with a good leader, can achieve that. That is the opposite of a president who wants us to believe he is next to Jesus Christ, and we should all worship him.
We need to use the law for charity organizations that prevent them from having a tax exemption if they become politically active. We need to put our foot down hard and stop letting evangelicals run right over our nation. And we need to have a strong civics education. Only when democracy is protected in the classroom is it protected. We stopped civic education when we focused education on technology, and left churches to care for our morals. The American dream got replaced by the Christian mythological nation with their next to Jesus Christ President, concentrating all power in him. TV evangelist and ministers, who support this destruction of our democracy, can at least lose their tax exemption.
The problem the US faces is replacing the education for democracy we had with the 1958 National Defense Education Act. That ended transferring our culture to the young. It ended the non-religious education for good moral judgment. And it replaced the American dream based on philosophy and the Enlightenment, with the Christian Nation. The result is moral and cultural breakdown, and the Evangelicals are replacing our understanding of democracy with their Christian Nation and a president whom they put next to Jesus Christ.
As a TV evangelist put it. Because Trump is so powerful, we can know God stands with him. Trump is our of Hitler because our young had the education for technology that Germany had, and moral education was left to the church. The Evangelicals are gleefully replacing our American dream with their Christian Nation. The worse we become, the more power the police state gains because we are running on their mythology, and perversely, our failure proves the Christians right. We are destroying our democracy because we left education to the experts, and do not understand what it has to do with the growing evil.
If we continue to ignore what Christianity has to do with what is happening, we stand to lose our democracy. To be fair, some churches take a strong stand in favor of the separation of church and state.
But they are not the Evangelicals who strongly support Trump and the belief that God chose him to be our president.
Ah, I was misinformed. It was his chief of staff who ended up resigning, Ryan Neuhaus. Roberts has apologized but says he wants to stay at Heritage.
Quoting RogueAI
No, not true. Tucker's anti-Israel shift seems to have changed that.
Quoting RogueAI
So Vance repudiates Fuentes directly, Trump claims not to know him, and you still manage to claim that they are pro-Fuentes. You seem to be a man who has already decided on his conclusion, and is now in search of evidence to back it. Good luck with your post hoc search.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146
"I love Hitler: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans racist chat"
And MAGA darling (before he turned on Trump) Elon Musk's Ai turning into "Mechahitler", and Trump's dinner with Kanye and Fuentes and Trump's use of Naziesque language (https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary) and "good people on both sides" after the Charlottesville rally, etc.
Okay, this is a good point. I don't follow politics too closely. I was surprised to see conservatives defending Tucker's platforming of Fuentes and I have been trying to understand it. But this is a noteworthy antecedent.
Quoting RogueAI
Well this strikes me as leftist propaganda. Most of this has been explicitly clarified or corrected.
For example, even left-leaning Politifact published a transcript that shows what Trump actually said. It is a shopworn misrepresentation to claim that Trump somehow gave an endorsement to neo-Nazis.
Thank you.
"Well this strikes me as leftist propaganda. Most of this has been explicitly clarified or corrected."
Musk's Ai literally called itself MechaHitler.
It wasn't just Democrats who called out Trump over Charlottesville.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-sen-cory-gardner-urges-trump-to-call-charlottesville-crash-terrorism/
"Weve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you cant tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I dont know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. Let him. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide."
Trump today.
The whole "free speech" angle strikes me as a red herring on this topic. Tucker is of course able to platform Fuentes according to the first amendment. So if folks want to talk about free speech, then I think Trump is right (i.e. Tucker and Fuentes are both engaged in legally protected speech).
Now I have only followed some of the objections from the conservatives, and those objections are not made on first amendment grounds. To answer those objections with an appeal to free speech is an ignoratio elenchi.
But our difference is of course that you think Trump is lying and I don't, namely when he says, "I don't know much about him."
But if you're saying that NOW Trump isn't lying when he says he doesn't know who Fuentes is, after the latest kerfuffle? How can you believe that? Trump will have been briefed by now by his very capable campaign manager-turned-chief of staff exactly who Fuentes is and what the controversy is about. It's been roiling the conservative world for two weeks now. Trump is either lying or addled if he claims he doesn't know who Fuentes is at this point (or "not much about him")
What you've been arguing with me, if I'm not mistaken, is the rot in the GOP is relegated to the fringe. You said "Now that Republicans are learning who Fuentes is, we are seeing lots of opposition."
Are we? Trump just had a softball lobbed at him about it. Shouldn't he have said something like, "He shouldn't have had Fuentes on. Full stop." Why pussyfoot around on it? Why give moral support to Tucker when he's being raked over the coals by traditional Republicans over platforming people like Fuentes?
Okay, fair.
Quoting RogueAI
Mostly because I've watched more than 5 hours of video and I don't know who Fuentes is (including the Tucker interview, Fuentes' recap, and the D'Souza debate). I thought <this> was a good take, but I am surprised at how many people watch Fuentes and how hard he is to pigeonhole. I am not even convinced that the guy himself knows who he is or what he is doing.
Quoting RogueAI
I like the thesis of Fetterman and others who claim that conservative opposition to anti-Semitism is much more pronounced than progressive opposition to anti-Semitism, but maybe you agree with that.
The relevant question seems to ask how American conservatism is situated vis-a-vis an ethno-centric right. I actually don't see a great danger of conservatism flirting with ethno-centrism, and the outcry against Tucker is one of my data points. Conservatism does need to figure out how to manage the pendulum backlash against leftist identity politics, but I don't see ethno-centrism as a huge issue. I don't know if you disagree?
Quoting RogueAI
I think someone in a position like Tucker's should have Fuentes on and go at him hard, namely by making him answer for the clips that become infamous. Pin him down on his historical inaccuracies surrounding WWII, etc. The guy has too large of a following to simply be ignored.
(Tucker and Candace Owens are remarkable cases of the nuttiness that can affect the right.)
He's a white nationalist Christian fundamentalist who hates Jews.
https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/nick-fuentes-jews-are-running-society-women-need-shut-fuck-blacks-need-be
"Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it's that simple... We need white men in charge of everything again. That's it. Like, it's that simple."
"I like the thesis of Fetterman and others who claim that conservative opposition to anti-Semitism is much more pronounced than progressive opposition to anti-Semitism, but maybe you agree with that."
I agree with Fetterman. There's been a strain of anti-Semitism on the Left for my whole life. People like Louis Farrakhan have been tolerated when they shouldn't have been. The Left is terrible about calling it out.
That being said, I always wonder why the right-wing, which is dominated by Christians who have traditionally been hostile to Jews, loves Israel so much. There's something nefarious about it: [ChatGPT content] Many Republicansespecially white evangelicalssupport Israel because their end-times theology says Israel must exist and be defended for biblical prophecy to unfold. In this view, the return of Jews to Israel and Israels survival are prerequisites for the Second Coming. The motivation is religious prophecy, not affection for Jews. I wonder how prevalent that view is.
Quoting Leontiskos
MAGA is extremely white-nationalist. Did you mention you don't live in America?
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, that's what should have happened. What actually happened was Tucker fawned over Fuentes, and now Trump is coming to Tucker's rescue. There's an old saying: the fish rots from the head.