How do you think two separate universes - one in which conservatives got their political way in everything in the US, and one in which liberals got their political way in everything in the US - would play out?
Assume from 2015-2035, twenty years. If conservatives were given full, uncontested political power in the USA for twenty years (2015-2035):
Minimum wage would be abolished.
Voter ID laws would be present nationwide.
The US-Mexico border would be guarded, fortified, and under surveillance to the point where it would resemble the Korean DMZ.
Abortion would be banned in all cases except rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger.
There would be a low flat income tax for all.
The national debt would have been paid off.
The USA’s population would increase to 370 million, mainly due to the abortion ban.
A Constitutional amendment would be passed, recognizing only traditional marriage.
A Constitutional amendment would be passed, requiring a balanced budget.
There would be hundreds of executions nationwide every year, mainly for homicide.
Creationism would be taught in public schools instead of evolution.
More students would be homeschooled than public schooled.
There would be severe penalties for frivolous malpractice lawsuits that drive up the cost of health care.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and welfare would be drastically scaled down or nonexistent.
The economy’s GDP would be $40 trillion.
Unemployment would be low.
The environment would suffer major damage.
Military spending would account for 4% of GDP.
There would be a huge expansion of nuclear energy and oil drilling.
The USA would be 80% white, 20% nonwhite.
Affirmative action of any kind would be banned.
The federal governmental workforce would be halved in size.
A manned Mars landing would have taken place.
The USA and China would be in a cold war of sorts.
The ACA would be repealed.
There would be much tighter regulations on the media.
Most firearm-ownership laws would be repealed.
Assistance aid to Israel would be greatly increased.
Governmental spending would be greatly decreased.
Certain “unacceptable” opinions and news outlets would be banned or gotten rid of.
If liberals were given full, uncontested political power in the USA for twenty years (2015-2035):
The Electoral College would be abolished.
Minimum wage would be $40 an hour.
Taxes would be extremely heavy on the wealthy.
The USA would be 40% white, 60% nonwhite, due to drastically increased immigration.
Immigration would be virtually unrestricted.
The death penalty would be abolished.
The national debt would be $50 trillion.
All illegal immigrants would be given citizenship.
Puerto Rico would become the 51st state.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and welfare would be doubled in size and scope.
The economy’s GDP would be $25 trillion.
Unemployment would be high.
The environment would be pristine.
The federal governmental workforce would be greatly increased in size.
The Second Amendment would be repealed and gun ownership would be banned.
Military spending would account for 1% of GDP.
There would be single-payer health care.
Certain politically-incorrect opinions and news outlets would be banned or gotten rid of.
Nuclear energy would be phased out entirely.
Non-citizens in the US would be allowed to vote.
Many big companies would have fled overseas.
Most Americans would be driving hydrogen cars.
The USA would have had a gay or lesbian president.
The USA would have had a Hispanic president.
The USA would have had a female president.
The Taft-Hartley Act would be repealed.
The US would withdraw from all overseas bases and the military’s size would be cut in half.
Churches and religious nonprofits would be taxed.
Marijuana and most other such drugs would be legal nationwide.
Gay and polygamous marriage would be recognized in all states.
Abortions would be encouraged and paid for by the government.
The US nuclear arsenal would be dismantled entirely.
Free contraception would be given to all.
Constant labor union strikes would hamper the economy.
Governmental spending would be greatly increased.
What do you think these two Americas would look like?
Conservative-verse would collapse in a puff of paradox since what conservatives want is a logically contradictory mish-mash. They can’t get all they want; it’s logically impossible due to their own philosophical incoherency. The OP’s own list provides examples; you can’t do all of those things at the same time, many are mutually exclusive.
I’m pretty damn liberal…and there are several items on the liberal list that I would fight very hard to prevent.
I’m willing to bet that a good many conservatives disagree equally strongly with many of the items on the conservative list.
It might be instructive to put the two lists up as polls. (People would be asked to limit themselves to voting for their own ideological agenda. Cross voting would be naughty, and we would waggle a judgemental finger at anyone who would do that.)
Ultimately, the worlds where we get what we want would look vaguely similar: both sides want peace, freedom, the rule of law, representative government, adherence to the constitution, a strong economy, etc. Both sides have a moderate middle that is willing to compromise, and which rejects the extremists who are only ostensibly on their side.
A conservative friend of mine said to me, “We’re both trying to get to Jerusalem, just by different roads.”
I’m assuming a truly liberal US would resemble the scandinavian countries. No idea what a truly conservative US would resemble as I don’t think any wealthy contemporary countries enact the things you list for them (eliminating the social safety net and environmental protections). Even middle income countries try to have those things. Maybe a wealthier version of the US pre-FDR and pre-new deal.
The part about conservatives banning unacceptable opinions would apply to both sides, liberals can be pretty aggressive about wanting to phase out unpopular speech too.
It seems pretty obvious which straw man the OP prefers.
As to contradictory points in Conservatopia, both banning abortion **and **having the population revert to 80% white don’t go together at all. After all, non-whites are the ones both breeding more rapidly today AND having the larger fraction of abortions.
Unless you’re planning to render stateless or execute a large fraction of those scary non-white citizens.
I also think you got the future GDPs backwards between your two strawmen.
Also, neither side is monolithic–there are factions with in each (the tea party and the establishment, the Warren/de Blasio-wing of the Democratic Party and the Clinton-wing) that have their own internal battles. The OP seems to assume that the most extreme in each party get what they want, which isn’t true.
Also, the conservative population estimate is wrong. The US population is 316 million today, and the fertility rate is 1.88 children per woman (although immigration creates population growth). Anti-abortion websites (who would have a bias to inflate the number of abortions) say that about 1 million abortions take place a year. If there was no immigration, no one changed their behavior due to the abortion ban (which is rather unlikely), abortions take place at the highest estimates available and all those abortions are converted to births, the population in 2035 would be under 335 million. Not even close to 370 million.
I think an economic/government system much like the Conservative ideal would probably have a greater GDP (perhaps much greater) than we currently see (“a bigger pie”) but that the distribution of wealth, opportunity, and a lot of other qualities that Liberals hold dear, would be very lopsidedly skewed toward the wealthy, even more so than we currently see.
On the other hand, in a land of the Liberal/Progressive ideal, we would see more of the opposite: Useful productivity would be more hamstrung by all sorts of regulation: Minimum wage, working conditions, health and safety issues, environmental regulation, and so on: But the accumulated wealth and everything else would be more fairly distributed among everybody.
This was, for example, one of the (largely unspoken) debates during the early 1990’s when NAFTA was being discussed. Greater international free trade, NAFTA style, was widely argued to be desirable because it would increase commerce and thus demand and thus increase the economic pie. But it was less widely acknowledged (by the proponents, of course) that the increase in productivity would largely go toward the enrichment of the factory owners, entrepreneurs, and other “fat cat capitalists”. The impoverished peasants working and living in the most squalid conditions in the maquiladoras weren’t going to see any of that.
But they want to cut spending and increase spending at the same time. A great many things they want cost money, including things on that list. Also:
You aren’t going to have a population boom when you’ve genocided or ethnically cleansed a significant portion of the population, massively contaminated the environment, rolled back social programs and protections for workers and all the rest. You’ll have a population contraction, due to both all the direct killing and the massive amounts of illness and widespread starvation.
Nor would there be an economic boom, there’d be an economic collapse; you can’t kill, impoverish, poison and generally screw over the general population and have an economic boom in a consumer driven economy.
You can’t eliminate the national debt, pay for a bigger military or pay for all those other police-state measures when you’ve massively lowered tax revenues with things like a flat tax and the impoverishment, imprisonment and/or extermination of most of the population.
And the only way unemployment would be “low” under such a system would be if they legalized slavery and started rounding up people, or just killed the unemployed.
Brief highjack, but, actually, it didn’t work out that way. The maquiladora process ended up making the northern tier of Mexico the richest. Also (personal experience here!) the workers would go to the factories, get training and experience…then leave and get better jobs, or start companies of their own. The company I worked for had to pay higher and higher wages to get and keep good employees.
(Also…boasting a little…my company followed California standards for pollution, chemical safety, workplace safety, etc. We didn’t strictly have to…but it made the Mexican regulators so much happier with us. It was a very wise good-neighbor strategy.)
I’m pretty sure that conservatives and liberals agree that there is no point in living with a universe of only conservatives or liberals having the exact system that they want. A good part of the point of the conservative/liberal agenda is enjoying the other side enduring what we consider justice and seeing that it works. Like liberals having a decent minimum wage and making conservatives see that it doesn’t destroy the fabric of society. Or vice versa, being able to pay next to no wages and getting exactly the employees and abilities you pay for without destroying the fabric of society.
Your “liberalverse” doesn’t resemble anything actual liberals would be interested in, and your conservativeverse is incoherent.
As for the result of actual liberals and conservatives getting what they want; with liberals you basically get a more right wing and religious version of Europe, and with conservatives you end up with a failed state and a major proportion of the population dead.
Thatcher’s Britain was more liberal than Carter’s America or Obama’s America. Sweden is to the left of Britain. In Europe, the Democratic Party of the US would be center-right. So we have a pretty good idea of what would happen if US liberals took over- just look across the pond.
The US modern conservative agenda involves of balanced budget amendment. If it worked that would imply tax increases during recessions and tax cuts during booms. (Or spending increases during booms and spending cuts during recessions.) Either way, that is de-stabilizing. Now throw in the gold standard to shackle monetary policy. I know it’s not on the OP’s list, but it is right wing. You’ve basically written a recipe for economic instability.
Next we demolish the long run supply side of the economy by slashing education spending and indoctrinating the public against the scientific method. You’ve basically delivered a version of Argentina, a once promising country that was undermined by piss-poor but crowd-pleasing economic policies. Congratulations.
1 (for both) prepare to suppress revolution as both combine authoritarian dispositions with disenfranchising the majority of the population (including some in their party).
2 (for both) If disenfranchisement/authoritarianism don’t reach a level to prevent it,they watch the splintering of their faction when the “enemy of my political enemy is my friend” effect no longer matters
2 in effect negates them being able to ram through a list as clear cut as in the OP. Political discourse tends towards a false dichotomy that treats the parties as monolithic (while assigning liberal/conservative wholly to a party) So that pushes back towards tyranny to achieve any kind of complete party agenda. Overt tyranny is especially necessary to achieve some of the outcomes ascribed to both lists in the first post within the short time frames imagined. Which leads us back to point 1 for both sides… the tree of liberty is getting watered! The only difference is the political label of the tyrants serving as it’s natural manure.
I do like the idea that America being liberal would cause major corporations to “flee overseas”. Where? America is freakishly right wing; everywhere else is either well to the left of America or a hellhole.
I’m reminded of the right wingers like Limbaugh who talked about fleeing the “threat” of a national health care system. To where? Limbaugh even made noises about going to Costa Rica, which (of course) has one.