So, I live in a European country where our right-wing politics would probably be considered “left” by Republican Americans.
I vote sort of central. Not too left, not too right. Even though I disagree with many things that our rightwinged politicians stand for, I can see some merit in them at times. The same with our left-leaning politicians.
When I see discussions among Americans, it seems to me either party just hates the other party, automatically calling them bigoted. And it comes across as a heavily divided country without any hope for reconciliation.
So 2 questions: Republicans: is there any democratic strength you wish your party would implement?
And democrats: is there any republican strength that you wish your party would implement?
The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”
All the “I like Republicans’ fiscal conservatism” people in this thread need to read this. “Fiscal conservatism” and “small government” are and always have been dogwhistles for racism and other forms of bigotry. “Government waste” does not refer to inefficiency in government spending, it’s code for programs that help the poor and minorities.
The core of Conservative ideology is a belief in the existence of natural hierarchy, where all people owe privilege to the wise and righteous beings above them and are obligated to punish those below for their inferiority. The Conservatives themselves, having designed this hierarchy, are oh-so-conveniently at the very top of it. Everything that Republicans do makes sense when viewed from this perspective.
I used to believe the Republican party brought much needed conservatism to the table. There were reasonable concerns that the Democratic party was too heavy handed with implementing morality and over reaching laws. The Democratic party has mostly been in the right side of social permissivness since then and the Republican party has gone fucking crazy Reactionary which they have rebranded as “Conservative”. It has become an intersection dynamic where the Democratic party has become a coalition of progressives and conservatives, who just to want to keep the rights they have. Unfortunately there are many “Team R” fans that don’t recognize that their party no longer represents them.
So short answer, the Democratic party has already absorbed the strengths of the Republican party.
I wonder how much it is the parties changed and how much it is we changed as a people. When I was a kid it was a race to the middle, the majority of the population could vote either way. Now the middle is basically gone and power is from who can get their base motivated.
For me, a two party system seems really odd too. The flipside though, is having like 18 parties that all represent something, which takes way more cooperation and finding middle ground. This might seem good on paper, but can sometimes lead to indecisiveness or an unwillingness to take unpopular decisions. In the long run, that might cause a country to slowly fall behind on various topics due to a lack of vision.
Source: I’m a Dutch guy who has seen this happen in it’s own country.
And by “keep the rights that they have” they mean virtually unrestricted access to firearms and the right to discriminate against anyone they want protected by a thing guise of “religious freedom” that also magically protects them from discrimination of any kind.
My bad. I misread your statement entirely as applying to conservatives and missed the whole “coalition of progressives and” part. I guess my own reactive bullshit was engaged ahead of my critical thinking there. Your points are valid and I was apparently just looking for an argument there.
And democrats: is there any republican strength that you wish your party would implement?
We had 8 years of Obama where he tried to meet them in the middle and that was a flop. I don’t even know what they really stand for as it’s always shifting. The only concrete things seem to be hurting other people. I ones I know in my personal life genuinely believe that things are only bad because the media keeps bring up police violence and inequality.
I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).
I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans’ ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.
I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That’s a real monkey’s paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.
Speaking personally… yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It’s not a scar… it’s still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There’s been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.
I just searched for what the US Republicans actually want:
The positions of the Republican Party have evolved over time. Currently, the party’s fiscal conservatism includes support for lower taxes, gun rights, government conservatism, free market capitalism, free trade, deregulation of corporations, and restrictions on labor unions.
Yeah that’s a REAL generous list if you look at the laws that they are actually pushing. Keep in mind they are passing laws at the state level mostly and preventing the federal govt from restricting it.
It’s basically is the confederacy trying to “rise again” as they’ve always threatened.
If they are not stopped politically it will lead to them being stopped violently just like their shitty forefathers were. The rest of us are trying everything we can to help their supporters understand what they are doing, but their propaganda has been strong for decades.
Although I’m not a conservative myself, I still see a case to be made for a government that is “conservative”.
I.e. a government that doesn’t respond with a law for every single small thing. There is a danger to turn a country into a bureaucratic nightmare. Where people will find loopholes in laws, and a government responds by patching that loophole up with another law or clause. A labyrinth of laws can and will cause suffering for people that are edge cases.
Or do I read the term “government conservatism” wrong here?
Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors – think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with “liberal” values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., “Social Security” or “Medicaid” or “food stamps” instead of just asking “should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?” people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.
Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there’s just not many viable mechanisms to do that.
Yeah, Biden and the DNC probably fall mid right in halls neck of the woods (or a neutral l/r spectrum at least)
I’m far more left than democrats, but I’m all for the conceptual Republican that doesn’t really exist - somebody who wants to keep an eye on the balance of things, like ensuring govt contracts are on the level and priced appropriately instead of being massive handouts for billionaires on the taxpayer dime.
I do see a lot of merit in traditional Republican goals like fiscal conservatism, and most of my adult life have at least understood the Republican position and have even voted in their direction. However they seem to have been taken over by their more extreme reactionaries, that I can neither understand nor condone.
Now I think of the Democrats the way I used to think of Republicans. They’re a nice centrist or right leaning platform to help balance the Progressive polices we really need. Some of that’s a big swing to the left for me, but not all of it
I’m not a democrat, I’m far more left. But if there’s something I’d like the Republicans to do, it’s to actually repeal some of their laws and attempt to make the government a bit smaller and more efficient (without just removing funding/programs/departments). Currently, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
I think this is where my disconnect and perhaps even some unintentional disbelieve in these types of conversations comes from. The political landscape feels like a completely different world to me. It is easier for me to study, say, the political landscape of China or India because the culture is so vastly different from ours. USA always feels close in values and everyday culture to Europe, yet so completely different too.
make the government a bit smaller and more efficient
That used to be a core plank on the Republican platform and we can all use more of that. However over the last couple decades they’re more focused on the destructive part of that, and are all out of constructive proposals on how to make it work
I wish the Democrats would lay off the gun control.
Regarding taxes, both parties fail in different ways. Democratic tax policy fails at the Federal level - low/zero taxes at the Federal level makes sense because the Federal government hasn’t needed to collect taxes since establishing the Federal Reserve banking system and moving off the gold standard. Republican tax policy fails at the State level - low taxes at the State level makes less sense, because the states actually need the money to pay for programs that market forces do not provide for.
Neither party is doing enough to make our military industry more efficient, less organizationally top heavy, and less corrupt. Spending resources on war is bad, but losing a war to tyrants like China or Russia would be worse. I want USA to have more weapons for less money.
Both parties fail when it comes to welfare programs. Republicans would implement sadistic and self-destructive abolition of all safety nets. Democrats craft welfare programs that pull the rug out from under people as soon as they start down the road toward financial stability, trapping people in poverty by removing the safety net too soon. For example, Medicaid is the only good healthcare available in this backwards nation, but you need to stay poor to get it - earn too much money and you’ll end up poorer than when you started.
The problem with America is that they don’t have left or right, they have two authoritarian parties, powered by corruption. And people fight each other over which type of authoritarianism is better.
So, I live in a European country where our right-wing politics would probably be considered “left” by Republican Americans.
I vote sort of central. Not too left, not too right. Even though I disagree with many things that our rightwinged politicians stand for, I can see some merit in them at times. The same with our left-leaning politicians.
When I see discussions among Americans, it seems to me either party just hates the other party, automatically calling them bigoted. And it comes across as a heavily divided country without any hope for reconciliation.
So 2 questions: Republicans: is there any democratic strength you wish your party would implement?
And democrats: is there any republican strength that you wish your party would implement?
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
This is the foundation of the current Republican party. There is nothing redeemable.
All the “I like Republicans’ fiscal conservatism” people in this thread need to read this. “Fiscal conservatism” and “small government” are and always have been dogwhistles for racism and other forms of bigotry. “Government waste” does not refer to inefficiency in government spending, it’s code for programs that help the poor and minorities.
The core of Conservative ideology is a belief in the existence of natural hierarchy, where all people owe privilege to the wise and righteous beings above them and are obligated to punish those below for their inferiority. The Conservatives themselves, having designed this hierarchy, are oh-so-conveniently at the very top of it. Everything that Republicans do makes sense when viewed from this perspective.
I used to believe the Republican party brought much needed conservatism to the table. There were reasonable concerns that the Democratic party was too heavy handed with implementing morality and over reaching laws. The Democratic party has mostly been in the right side of social permissivness since then and the Republican party has gone fucking crazy Reactionary which they have rebranded as “Conservative”. It has become an intersection dynamic where the Democratic party has become a coalition of progressives and conservatives, who just to want to keep the rights they have. Unfortunately there are many “Team R” fans that don’t recognize that their party no longer represents them.
So short answer, the Democratic party has already absorbed the strengths of the Republican party.
I wonder how much it is the parties changed and how much it is we changed as a people. When I was a kid it was a race to the middle, the majority of the population could vote either way. Now the middle is basically gone and power is from who can get their base motivated.
the real issue is having only two parties. it makes the tribalism even stronger.
For me, a two party system seems really odd too. The flipside though, is having like 18 parties that all represent something, which takes way more cooperation and finding middle ground. This might seem good on paper, but can sometimes lead to indecisiveness or an unwillingness to take unpopular decisions. In the long run, that might cause a country to slowly fall behind on various topics due to a lack of vision.
Source: I’m a Dutch guy who has seen this happen in it’s own country.
And by “keep the rights that they have” they mean virtually unrestricted access to firearms and the right to discriminate against anyone they want protected by a thing guise of “religious freedom” that also magically protects them from discrimination of any kind.
I was speaking of democrats wanting to preserve reproductive rights (privacy) and civil rights for minorities.
My bad. I misread your statement entirely as applying to conservatives and missed the whole “coalition of progressives and” part. I guess my own reactive bullshit was engaged ahead of my critical thinking there. Your points are valid and I was apparently just looking for an argument there.
We had 8 years of Obama where he tried to meet them in the middle and that was a flop. I don’t even know what they really stand for as it’s always shifting. The only concrete things seem to be hurting other people. I ones I know in my personal life genuinely believe that things are only bad because the media keeps bring up police violence and inequality.
You should just read what the Republicans will do if Trump is reelected.
They’ve published their plans, and I want exactly zero of any of the “policy” they plan on implementing.
I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).
I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans’ ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.
I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That’s a real monkey’s paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.
Speaking personally… yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It’s not a scar… it’s still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There’s been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.
I just searched for what the US Republicans actually want:
No, absolutely no redeeming qualities here.
Yeah that’s a REAL generous list if you look at the laws that they are actually pushing. Keep in mind they are passing laws at the state level mostly and preventing the federal govt from restricting it.
It’s basically is the confederacy trying to “rise again” as they’ve always threatened.
If they are not stopped politically it will lead to them being stopped violently just like their shitty forefathers were. The rest of us are trying everything we can to help their supporters understand what they are doing, but their propaganda has been strong for decades.
Here’s the GOP platform:
Koch
It’s the Libertarian platform from 1980!! https://lpedia.org/wiki/Document:National_Platform_1980
Although I’m not a conservative myself, I still see a case to be made for a government that is “conservative”. I.e. a government that doesn’t respond with a law for every single small thing. There is a danger to turn a country into a bureaucratic nightmare. Where people will find loopholes in laws, and a government responds by patching that loophole up with another law or clause. A labyrinth of laws can and will cause suffering for people that are edge cases.
Or do I read the term “government conservatism” wrong here?
The parties don’t stand for anything. They are self-preserving entities.
They are defined by their electorates
In the sense I am defined by the bowl of crackers I just ate
White and crumbly, possibly oregano flavored?
I wish. I am made out of yellow stuff that might be cheese
Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors – think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with “liberal” values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., “Social Security” or “Medicaid” or “food stamps” instead of just asking “should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?” people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.
Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there’s just not many viable mechanisms to do that.
Yeah, Biden and the DNC probably fall mid right in halls neck of the woods (or a neutral l/r spectrum at least)
I’m far more left than democrats, but I’m all for the conceptual Republican that doesn’t really exist - somebody who wants to keep an eye on the balance of things, like ensuring govt contracts are on the level and priced appropriately instead of being massive handouts for billionaires on the taxpayer dime.
I do see a lot of merit in traditional Republican goals like fiscal conservatism, and most of my adult life have at least understood the Republican position and have even voted in their direction. However they seem to have been taken over by their more extreme reactionaries, that I can neither understand nor condone.
Now I think of the Democrats the way I used to think of Republicans. They’re a nice centrist or right leaning platform to help balance the Progressive polices we really need. Some of that’s a big swing to the left for me, but not all of it
I’m not a democrat, I’m far more left. But if there’s something I’d like the Republicans to do, it’s to actually repeal some of their laws and attempt to make the government a bit smaller and more efficient (without just removing funding/programs/departments). Currently, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Note that “left” in the USA would usually be considered centrist or only slightly left in Europe.
As a dane, US left is more right than our right-most parties.
I think this is where my disconnect and perhaps even some unintentional disbelieve in these types of conversations comes from. The political landscape feels like a completely different world to me. It is easier for me to study, say, the political landscape of China or India because the culture is so vastly different from ours. USA always feels close in values and everyday culture to Europe, yet so completely different too.
You don’t necessarily know how left I am, though
Hah, true.
That used to be a core plank on the Republican platform and we can all use more of that. However over the last couple decades they’re more focused on the destructive part of that, and are all out of constructive proposals on how to make it work
Belgium?
The Netherlands :)
I wish the Democrats would lay off the gun control.
Regarding taxes, both parties fail in different ways. Democratic tax policy fails at the Federal level - low/zero taxes at the Federal level makes sense because the Federal government hasn’t needed to collect taxes since establishing the Federal Reserve banking system and moving off the gold standard. Republican tax policy fails at the State level - low taxes at the State level makes less sense, because the states actually need the money to pay for programs that market forces do not provide for.
Neither party is doing enough to make our military industry more efficient, less organizationally top heavy, and less corrupt. Spending resources on war is bad, but losing a war to tyrants like China or Russia would be worse. I want USA to have more weapons for less money.
Both parties fail when it comes to welfare programs. Republicans would implement sadistic and self-destructive abolition of all safety nets. Democrats craft welfare programs that pull the rug out from under people as soon as they start down the road toward financial stability, trapping people in poverty by removing the safety net too soon. For example, Medicaid is the only good healthcare available in this backwards nation, but you need to stay poor to get it - earn too much money and you’ll end up poorer than when you started.
The problem with America is that they don’t have left or right, they have two authoritarian parties, powered by corruption. And people fight each other over which type of authoritarianism is better.