Yup. But it means that racism isn’t a deal breaker for the rest.
Most republicans who support Roy Moore aren’t ok with trying to rape 16 year olds or molesting 14 year olds. But they don’t consider it a deal breaker either.
Being an enabler of bad behavior isn’t really much better than being a proponent of it. Democrats aren’t perfect, but I’m glad we are at least trying to hold people accountable nowadays.
I feel validated by your various sources so I wanted to say thanks. Here is the money quote at the Nation describing racial attitudes in which immigration is a major component, and its excitement over one particular finding:
Over at Vox, the article discusses prejudices in the white community and veers into the fact that the poor whites face prejudices of their own; it’s not very strong condemnation. The best part is that the author believes that “the empirical research, after all, shows that more immigration can ultimately lift up the entire country’s economy, benefiting everyone” - within this sentence is a link to yet another article calling out Bernie Sanders for a similar bigoted, racist, xenophobic, nativist, white nationalist gaffe. He opposes open borders.
And in that article I think we finally have an explanation as to why limiting immigration is racist:
OK then. Now we know where we stand.
The Left thinks liberals are racist (“The Clintons owned slaves” is a popular left meme) and that America is a white supremacist nation. They’re not confused by why Trump is so popular. Liberals are the ones searching for answers, or at least the ones who thought America was already great.
American liberals support the war on drugs, the security state, prison labor, immigrant labor exploitation, gentrification of minority neighborhoods, means testing and gutting welfare, and of course imperialism abroad against black, brown, and yellow people. That’s what America calls the left.
Correction: In a world where everybody denies that they’re racist, denial is not a meaningful proof of anything.
How many liberals do you know, and where are you from?
I know that was is called a liberal in the US is considered center-left by European standards. We don’t have a far left in the US. But what you are saying is pretty excessive.
Many liberals in the public and in politics have fought against the drug war, prison labor, exploitation of immigrants, gutting welfare, etc.
I’m on the left and this is mostly nonsense.
He’s playing off the confusion with ‘neoliberals’ with ‘liberal’, and the fact that the Clintons were much more close to neoliberalism than to left-liberalism. The Clinton presidency was indeed a tough in crime, welfare-ending, war-on-drugs-supporting, free-marketeering, “Superpredator”-inventing, military-projecting, politically triangulating paragon of neoliberalism. If you believe that the Clintons are paragons of “liberalism”, then yes, liberalism does equal the awful things we say about conservatives.
Of course, neoliberalism and liberalism are essentially opposites of each other. Of course, the Clintons aren’t the standard-bearer of what liberalism is. But liberals have allowed the the Clintons have been the de-facto leaders of the Democratic party for some time now. Liberals also seem to live in a state of denial of what the Clintons actually represent, so they leave themselves wide open to association with all the worst aspects of neoliberalism. And that’s before we even get to the liberal denial of all Bill’s rapey stuff, which is looking worse and worse in hindsight.
So yeah, liberals, you/we present some very mixed moral messaging until the Clintons are decisively ejected from our tribe.
Sanders and Warren are the closest we have to standard bearers of liberalism. The Clinton’s and Obamas were not liberals.
Either way, the 1990s were a different time. The electorate was more conservative and fewer voters identified as liberals. I think back then barely 10% of voters would identify as liberals, now it is 25%.
Also Clinton did a lot of good things. His 1993 budget had a lot of tax hikes on the wealthy. Higher income tax rates, eliminating the Medicare tax cap, amt went up, corporate tax rate went up. This was followed by a long period of economic growth.
Also the Clinton’s tried to institute uhc. Had they succeeded, we’d be in a much better place as a nation. They also expanded Pell grants, earned income tax credit, created (unpaid) fmla, oversaw a period of economic growth and growth that benefitted the lower quintiles of income.
Their economic policy involved tax hikes on the rich and help for the working class, middle class and the poor.
Leftist/The Left = anti-capitalists (socialism, anarchism, communism, syndicalist)
Liberal = capitalist, or as used in modern American discourse and what I usually mean, mainstream Democrats, pretty much anyone you see in the commercial press, and many of the posters on this board; tend to be meritocratic technocrats and suspicious of popular activism
What you call left-liberalism = democratic socialism AKA demsoc = capitalist welfare (Nordic countries, New Deal Dems, Berniecrats)
I don’t know if making a neo vs. OG lib distinction is relevant when it comes to racism and imperialism. The OGs loved Vietnam, supported fascist dictators, and the angelic Carter funneled guns to Suharto so he could continue his slaughter in East Timor.