They are rapidly becoming accepted in this country. Gee, in another 25 years, you’ll be able to shake their hand in broad daylight!
By the start of the '90s, the marriage rights movement was already at least a decade old. 1993 saw the first big legal win for marriage rights, in Hawaii, but it was reversed a few years later. By the mid-90s, it was a sufficiently hot topic in the country that they passed a law forbidding federal recognition of same sex marriages. DOMA, and the wave of state-level constitutional amendments targeting ssm were definite set backs, but I would argue that, “Therefore, you should never have tried,” is precisely the wrong message to take from that. There is absolutely no way we would have had gay marriage in 2015 if we’d only started agitating for it in 2010.
I don’t know.
I think the watershed event for gay rights was the collapse of don’t ask don’t tell. We saw gay service members that served honorably coming out of the closet and being treated horribly by people with little to no honor.
The homophobes in congress said we should do what the generals say.
When the generals stood by their gay service members and told conservative congressmen (to their surprise) they said the generals aren’t important, we ought to ask the enlisted. So they asked the enlisted and only the marines had a majority negative response. Then all of a sudden their argument was that enlisted marines were the only folks whose opinions counted because they were on the front lines. So a bunch of special ops guys came out of the closet and their fellow special ops guys said it didn’t make a difference to them and they wanted to fight with the best regardless of who they screw at night. When their families came out and said they wanted their husbands and sons and fathers to fight with the best soldiers regardless of their sexual orientation. Then we saw the homophobes continue to scramble and it got pretty obvious … and society changed.
I don’t know how essential fighting for gay marriage in the 1980s was to that series of events.
I think the quiet suffering of gay men and women in the military serving honorably under don’t ask don’t tell created the conditions for the cascade of events that led to social acceptance of homosexuality. That’s just my recollection of how things happened, it might be incorrect.
IMO, gay activism in the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots caused a massive shift in societal thinking and in getting a movement to coalesce that laid the groundwork that people built off of generations later. In spite of the fact that a lot of the response from society was very ugly and negative for years. I think the eventual wins for LGBT rights were partially due to societal factors that weren’t necessarily intended (like religious values in general becoming less conservative, and backlash from the AIDS epidemic), and also that politicians needed to plant the seed at some point, but the fertile ground was built by activists being willing to be confrontational, unified and brave.
Even in the near-term after Stonewall, you saw pretty significant progress such as homosexuality being declassified as a mental disorder.
Modnote: It is a very good conversation and debate and probably well worth its own thread, but lets end the “LGBT Rights” hijack of this thread now.
I totally agree it is insufficient, and keeping private insurers is a crippling inefficiency in the system. However, as a first step the ACA was huge.
If we’re talking anecdotes, I benefitted hugely from the ACA. In 2014 I lost my long-term job, and with it my health insurance. Depression and anxiety crippled me from being able to seek work. The ACA is what allowed me to get coverage so I could get help to get better. I needed it for 5 years, because even after I started working, it wasn’t in my career field, it was hourly work with no benefits.
I finally got a good enough job to get health care through work, but it was a struggle to get there. In the meantime, I not only needed to deal with mental health, but I had a number of physical health issues, including a surgery for a hernia. The ACA made that possible for me to afford.
The Medicaid expansion was blocked in a number of states, like Texas. However, there’s a much more significant part of the ACA that affects a lot more people - protecting pre-existing conditions.
I think a lot of people misunderstand that word. There’s not a list of specific issues that are designated “pre-existing” by some controlling source. A pre-existing condition can be any condition when you change insurance companies.
Say you break your foot. You need to get surgery, but it’s not an immediate urgent need, it is a delayed thing you schedule. Annual enrollment hits at work, and your company has decided to change providers, and your company isn’t on the list, so you have to get a new one.
Bam - your foot is a “pre-existing condition” - it is a condition you had before they became your provider. Oops, your foot surgery won’t be covered.
The reason diseases like cancer or diabetes get listed is those are chronic illnesses that can be hugely expensive over time, so insurance companies would love to have justification to not have to pay. And so people with those conditions either can’t get them covered, or can’t get covered at all. And it helps those are sympathy inducing.
That is the single biggest fix in the ACA.
It’s not so much an out-of-the-gate marketing headline, but there does need to be better prepared responses to the fiscal conservatives when they argue the cost is unworkable. Then it is definitely a relevant point to discuss the inefficiency, waste, and expense of for-profit insurance being the gate-keeper to health care.
Americans are so afraid of the “government bureaucrats” making all the health care decisions about who gets covered and what they will pay for, but we are mostly blind to the fact that the system is already run by bureaucrats - the for-profit insurance companies that slice and dice the money from both sides - the patients and the health care providers. Both of us get screwed, and they make out like bandits playing the go between.
2018 gave us a blue wave. Democrats won big, and grew seats in the House and Senate. Red states are getting more purple.
All the factors that caused the blue wave were still in force in 2020. Donald Trump was still a horrible President, and failing at the pandemic response to boot. Corruption in the Executive Branch was rampant, social issues were flaring. Growing public expression of racism, police brutality, the eliminations of the government protections for everything from pollution to voting rights were all factors that should have driven another blue wave.
Instead, the Democrats lost seats in the House, and down-ballot positions. Why? I think most of the blame goes to “Defund the Police”. That created an image of struggling police forces that already are underfunded and undermanned having fewer resources. That translates to slower response times, fewer investigators, more crime, including violent crime. That was an easy sell for Republicans, made easier by the riots and destruction caused by protestors.
White Americans want to be safer, and they still hold the majority in voting. They were scared by the Progressive agenda, but most significant was the idea of reducing or eliminating police. Boom - Donald Trump gets booted because he’s putrid, but the Senate, House, and down-ballot races go Republican.
See, I think conservatives see that as work.
Really, you are asking for people to stop and look beyond the headline to understand what you mean by a broad phrase that sounds like an excuse for laziness. When you explain it that way, it is much more tenable - it sounds sane. People who have reasonable justified need to not get a job is different to the vague “don’t want to work”.
Even though I’m sure those same objectors would be totally fine if you talked about two-parent families wanting one to stay home for child care. It’s the vision of the dreaded “welfare moms”, and the slackers sitting in mom’s basement playing video games and smoking weed, that drives the initial response.
What you’re advocating isn’t even redistribution; it’s collective centralization. One problem is that this would be met with extreme resistance - to put it mildly.
Another problem is, it probably wouldn’t work. Again, ownership is a tremendous responsibility, even if we’re talking about group ownership.
I think the solution is far less radical, even if it’s not all that popular in right wing circles. You’ll get absolutely no disagreement from me that the tax code needs to be reformed in a massive way. We’ve had 4 decades of pro-oligarchy tax reform, and even though I like what my 401-K and Roth IRA are doing now, I would be willing to take a hit if that meant more of a collectivist umbrella and we could get things like universal healthcare coverage and a reliable social security pension that increased as costs of living increased.
Incorrect, it is collective decentralization. I don’t support the Marxist-Leninist concept of all economic activity owned and directed by the state. That has shown to lead to dictatorship every time. And yes, my views might lead to extreme resistance, but we are willing and able to fight back.
I’m talking direct democracy in all areas: politically, economically, and socially. You seem to have the idea that the average worker can’t be trusted with the responsibility of ownership. When often the capitalists provide little more than investments in capital to make it possible, and the workers are the ones who keep the lights on in the end.
It’s not that they can’t be trusted with the responsibility of ownership; it’s a matter of whether they want that responsibility. Does the average worker in a mobile economy in which they have the freedom to take any type of employment - including self employment, side hustles, retirement, or no employment - does the average worker want to commit themselves to that responsibility? If not, I don’t see how that kind of organization functions, let alone competes in a marketplace
There’s probably more than a little bit of cause/effect in that, though.
I don’t think younger generations resisted the notion of womb-to-tomb employment (ie, work 30 years for IBM, and then retire with a healthy pension) or buying the one house in which you live and raise your kids, sending them away to college.
Rather, free market capitalism shattered that dream for many, if not most.
I suspect many people don’t view most of the characteristics you rightly pointed to as realities of today as advantages, but as involuntary adaptations to a rather difficult economic milieu.
I don’t disagree, but this is how modern American capitalism evolved. What’s the best way to correct these adaptations? He/She seemed to advocate just tearing apart proprietorship- is that realistically feasible?
I guess I’d be interested in having @Boudicca90 flesh out h/h/t thoughts on this.
What does …
… look like … in a theoretical company ? Are you just talking about employee-ownership as we know it today ?
Many, if not most, political scientists submit that direct democracy has its inherent limitations in the realm of political governance. If he argues that workers need representation, I’m in full agreement. But I’d settle for more empowerment and I think taxation and redistribution and reinvestment of wealth can achieve the same ends.
This is probably where I say, I’d rather be thought of as a social or collective capitalist rather than a democratic socialist. I don’t think the latter is an appealing label, and it probably fails to appeal because it wouldn’t work out that well.
I’m a business owner.
I am personally on the hook for several hundred thousand dollars if things were to fail.
There are some months when I don’t get paid, there are few months that I make more per hour than my lowest paid employee.
Are you saying that my employees should share in those obligations? That they should only get paid when there is money left over? That if we fail as a business, that they should share in paying off the debts and other financial guarantees?
When I was young and starting out, I thought that management and upper management were just a waste of money, a parasite upon my labor.
What I didn’t know, until I moved into those positions, is how much work goes on behind the scenes, how much I was unaware of that was required to keep my job at the bottom smoothly functioning.
There can still be a discussion about what kind of compensation is appropriate to those at the top vs at the bottom, and we can certainly see that that gap has only widened over time, especially in the last few decades.
But the idea that you don’t need a hierarchal structure, that you don’t need organization and management behind the scenes, that the workers can simply self organize and be productive, is the type of Dunning-Krueger mentality that workers tend to share, as they know very little about what actually goes into putting them into an effective work environment.
So, sure, lets make sure that the lowest worker earns a living wage, and while we are at it, lets make sure that those who are unable to work do too, and that even those who are unwilling to work are able to still live a life that is dignified, if spartan. Let’s claw back the profits that go to the top, and redistribute them to those whose labor went into creating that wealth.
But the idea that businesses can be run as a democracy, that there should be no hierarchy, no authority in charge, that people will simply do the jobs that they want to do, and that somehow, the jobs that no one wants to do will just get done, or will not be needed, is pure fantasy.
My pronouns are she/her and even though I consider myself more of a democratic socialist in practice, my views ultimately derive from council communism, that would be a good place to start for anyone more interested.
This is all more long-term than this discussion was originally about (it was originally about current progressive issues like Medicare For All), but that pretty much sums up my views. Too many people are viewing this through the lens of our currently existing capitalist economy, when I want capitalism to be abolished entirely.
Losses would be socialized as well, no one would be personally on the hook for anything and there would be no “debts” to pay off. And everyone will have basic human rights to housing, food, medical care, etc. so no one suffers too much if a business does go under. The capital would just be reappropriated to another venture by a worker’s council.
I never said say there would be no hierarchy or management, I am fully aware that it is still necessary in keeping everything running smoothly. Just that their power and wages would be no more that any other employee. They would delegate, but the ultimate power would be held by the workers as a whole.
Abolishing capitalism is as crazy as abolishing socialism. The best systems include a mix of capitalism and socialism. The incentive to innovate and provide the best quality goods and services needs to remain, and worker protections and the safety net should be bolstered to ensure that everyone has a good chance at a decent life. Broadly speaking, anyway.
There is no “mix” of capitalism and socialism, they are two completely different economic systems. What you are referring to with countries like Sweden, Norway, and other social democratic countries is capitalism with social welfare programs. There is no actual socialism in these countries, they have just tried to minimize the negatives of the capitalist systems that they have by providing social programs and regulations against the excesses of capitalist exploitation.