Still, per Pew Research Center:
Overall, 48% of all registered voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic compared with 44% who identify as Republican or lean toward the GOP.
I’m not clear here on what you are saying.
Are you calling me a bigot, a racist, or what?
You do realize that Hamlet isn’t a conservative, so he’s giving his (somewhat tongue in cheek or barbed in some cases) take on what he feels conservatives would reply to your question…right? And I’m not a conservative either, so I’m giving my own (biased) take as well. Which segues into the point Scylla was getting at wrt his question about why conservative/republicans who don’t support Trump would not come over to the dark side (or the rebel alliance if you like that better ;)). Even if Hamlet was an actual dyed in the wool conservative, just because YOU think the positions are ridiculous doesn’t mean they do…nor does it automatically invalidate them or make them unreasonable people. Just unreasonable from your biased perspective.
No, I hear about it endlessly. What I haven’t heard is people who a) predict that the progressives will come out as clear winners and b) use this prediction of possible future events as an argument against voting for the Democrats NOW, before that prediction has actually come true. Or am I misunderstanding your argument (or your attempt to paraphrase the argument of others, I guess)?
I am paraphrasing the arguments of others. I do NOT think the progressives will triumph over all and take over the Democratic party, nor do I think that even if they do that they will attempt to hijack the nation and take us socialist. But I know a bunch of people who do think this.
In general, I don’t hear conservatives drawing much of a distinction between the Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democrats. Like I said, if they did, seems like we would have heard at least some conservatives making the argument that, especially given the conspicuous flaws of their own candidate, one should vote for Clinton in order to weaken the position of the progressives. But I don’t remember ANYONE making that argument at the time. In fact, it was hard to find a Republican who seemed willing to acknowledge the theoretical possibility that Clinton’s victory might not be the worst possible case scenario imaginable.
You need to talk to more nuanced republicans/conservatives then. 
Some of my friends who are both actually voted FOR Clinton (while feeling sick and holding their noses) because they so disliked Trump. Many of them would have voted for Trump, however, if Sanders had won…or so they said.
But Clinton was kind of a special case. I think that more conservative/republican types realize the difference between left wing progressives and the establishment democrats. These would be the ones who DON’T always watch Fox news as their sole source for…well, for everything.
So, again, what’s your point beyond “people who disagree with you exist”? That they aren’t “invalid” people on that account? That my own opinions aren’t based on some objective truth, but are, well, my opinions? I’m not disputing any of that.
I believe that people should be treated fairly. Others believe that some people are inferior and deserve to be discriminated against. I’m not claiming that either belief is more intrinsically “reasonable” than the other, but I’m not going to apologize for having a strong preference for one over the other.
Well, I will admit I don’t personally know anyone who took that position, or for that matter, hardly anyone who even considered the possibility of voting for Trump for a microsecond. So the SDMB is broadening my horizons. 
Then that’s my point…I’m certainly not saying you have to apologize for having a strong preference/bias. You seem to realize you do (I certainly do, and I don’t apologize either). And you seem to realize that while YOU don’t find their objections valid, that they do and that makes them real, if only in their minds. Anyway, you asked why some folks might fear the left such that they would hold their noses and support Trump and got some answers…well, some answers from the perspective of non-conservative and non-republicans projecting anyway.
This is all just entirely too calm and reasonable for the Pit. We’d better stop before we get warnings.
Just say fuck a few times, or XT you are an idiot! and it should all be good. 
I’m saying that your characterization of these issues as “silly”, your inability to recognize why they’re important, is exactly why Republicans are thought of this way. They think being denied service because you’re gay is no big deal but writing “Adam and Steve” on a cake IS a big deal.
If you can read an account of Rosa Parks, and fail to understand why it’s dehumanizing to be asked to move so your “betters” can sit in the front, there’s really nothing I can do for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re called a bigot, or a racist, or any other nasty name someone can think of, you’re missing something, and I can’t give it to you.
A friend of my wife’s sat at my table years ago, and talked about his partner of 20 years dying and how difficult it was to deal with the hospital since they weren’t ‘married’. A republican hears that and says “they could have gotten this legal document, or that legal document to deal with it”, and doesn’t care that the law made their relationship less important than their own.
Maybe you’re not a bigot, but you want to protect them. Does that make you better than them?
Well, you’re the one who initially linked the “choice of battleground” with “big ideas” by invoking a hypothetical Chinese immigrant’s hypothetical love of freedom:
So tell us, Scylla: Why do you consider it nobly idealistic for somebody to get all boggle-minded and horrified over the tiny loss of freedom involved in a wedding-cake vendor being expected to sell somebody a wedding cake, but “ridiculous” and “trivial” for somebody to object to the tiny loss of freedom involved in a wedding-cake purchaser being discriminated against in purchasing a wedding cake?
If this is such a laughably small “battleground”, then why are you criticizing only one side for taking it seriously? Why are you portraying the concerns of the anti-discrimination side as petty and minor, while you defend the concerns of the pro-discrimination side (or, more accurately, the pro-option-to-discriminate side) as Big Important Passionate Dedication To the Cause of Freedom?
The answer is that I don’t believe there are reasonable and intelligent and well-informed conservatives who espouse that position.
If they still side with Republicans because they believe that Democrats are going to confiscate all their guns and turn the US into a communist dictatorship and sell their children into pizza-parlor pedophile rings or whatever they can think of that’s objectively worse than the odious failings of Trumpism, then they are some combination of irrational, stupid and/or ignorant.
If they are just floundering in the collapse of the traditional Republican policy pillars that I described in this earlier post, and can’t figure out a more constructive new policy direction, then that also calls their reasonableness and intelligence into question.
What reasons can you think of for preferring Trumpism to liberalism that can be validly defended by a conservative who is reasonable, intelligent and well-informed?
So, i’m no better than a bigot but you aren’t actually willing to call me one.
It seems to me like you are trying to have your cake and eat it, too.
I think you need to stop hedging. If you are going to get on this bus you should do so. Otherwise you should move aside for your betters.
Too bad he can’t get it decorated if he’s gay.
So if I’m reading you right, rather than responding in a substantive way to a reasoned criticism of your positions, you are instead annoyed that people are being reasonable which prevents you from hiding behind a faux-offended outcry at a descriptor.
Is that a fair assessment?
I know. I was there. It was awesome.
I don’t care about the baker. What I care about are the unintended consequences that could occur from some well-intentioned idiot who thinks the appropriate response to this is to make a new law, and that law causing us lasting and ongoing damage.
It would be easy to disprove my theory. Just go ahead and write the law that solves this problem without screwing something else. Let’s see it.
.
I’m not and I didn’t. I said the cake baker was wrong and it was unacceptable. I was quite clear on this
There is literally no one that thinks that. The challenge is to actually phrase the opposition’s position in such a way that they would agree with.
I would argue that if you can’t do that, you should not be a part of the debate until you can.
Yeah, ok same as the other one. Again, not looking for a straw man. Looking for an articulation of the position that somebody would actually endorse.
Absolutely none. Liberalism is awesome and so much better than Trumpism.
But we need to define terms. I’ve consistently asked why would somebody prefer Trump/Replublicanism to Democratic leftism.
“Liberal” is not interchangeable with Democrat or leftist.
In the simplest philosophical terms a conservative is someone who likes to keep things the way they are. A liberal is someone who likes to try new things.
That’s it. A lot of stuff gets built onto those basic philosophies. Conservatives are the guys you want running things when everything is going great. They care about protecting the status quo and preserving the positive. They look at a liberal and they see some fool kid that wants to fuck everything trying some crazy bullshit who should know better and leave well enough alone, and who is going to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Liberals are the guys you want running things when something is wrong. They care about improving the status quo, and when everybody thinks everything is groovy they are the guys who advocate for the people who are left behind. They look at a conservative and see a stodgy old bastard who’s stupid to know that he’s riding a runaway train to a cliff’s edge when the bridge is out, and couldn’g Give a shit as long as the steward brings him his drink.
So, liberals and conservatives need each other. So I think liberals are great. And I am one in some ways and conservative in others. What we have in common in America is that we believe in a country founded in God given individual rights, protected by a limited government.
That’s what it says in our founding documents anyway, and if we don’t agree on that, than we should update them.
So that’s where I come from with liberal and conservative.
The next layer I guess is Republican and Democrat. Exactly which party is supporting what and why shifts over time, but generally we associate Republicans as conservative and Democrats as liberal.
A lot of times a Republican can hold a Democratic viewpoint or vice versa Some of the issues are central enough that there is some mingling. Some of the issues change sides. For example, you could be a pro-choice Republican, or a Democrat who thinks we should have tax cuts.
If we go to the next level. We have right and left. You are on the right if you hold a view that is almost exclusively Democrat/liberal or exclusively Republican/conservative.
That’s pretty much the normal political spectrum, as I define it. You can be an individual anywhere on that spectrum, and you are a-ok in my book.
But there is one more sort of level. The lunatic fringe. There is a spectrum here that goes from pretty bad to much much much worse. I have actually spent a lot of time thinking about this and looking at this, because the lunatic fringe whether it is on the right, or on the left has the exact same philosophy in common. That philosophy is that your group identity is more important than your individual identity. They abandon the individual rights part of our common political heritage.
When you do this on the right what you get is fascism and Nazis. Nazis you’ll recall are responsible for somewhere around 60 million deaths in the 20th century. They are the poster boys for the ultimate bad guys.
Lucky for us, Nazis are easy to spot! Once somebody starts talking about racial superiority we know that some brand of fascism is coming into play. In it’s original vanilla flavor fascism combines this racial entitlement with nationalism for a particularly odious combination (pun intended)
When the left into the sovereignty of group identity, you have communism. Nazis get all the press but the communists are the world champs. Many accounts argue as high as 150 million killed in the 20th. Century under communism. Stalin and mao had the two worst, most oppressive, murderous regimes in history. They are every bit as bad, if not much worse than Nazis. They re no fucking joke.
Communism maintains a certain sort of cache or admiration among many these days, critiques of it are waved away as McCarthyism. But you read your Solzenhitsen, and study your cultural revolution and it’s pretty clear how bad communism is. The fact that is not despised the way Naziism is shameful and dangerous.
Anyhow. Communists are not as easy to spot as Nazis. It’s hard to tell when somebody has gone too far down the left and into the commie rabbit hole.
But there are some tells. Communists, like Nazis, think your group identity is more important than your individual identity. Communist revolutions are pretty similar. They divide the country into groups usually along the lines of a privileged elite, and an trodden upon underclass. They play on these resentments the same way the Nazis do. They attack free speech, and due process, people get shouted down and destroyed by acclaim. Belonging to the wrong group is enough that any accusation from the right group is believed. They allow no room for dissent, and they directly attack rationality.
That’s Communism.
So now that i’ve Defined my terms, I can answer your question. Knowing how bad Trump/Republicanism is, why would any rational intelligent comparing person prefer it the left/Democrats?
The rise of constructivism, identity politics, and intersectionality along with grievance politics is fundamentally irrational dangerous and evil, and it is openly communist.
The Democrats lost a huge lead in one week because a whole bunch of people woke up. Perhaps Kavanaugh is a bad guy and shouldn’t be confirmed. Who cares? Intersectional and identity politics bother an awful lot of people, people who don’t buy it but keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to be denounced and accused of racism, or genderism or whatever the flavor of the week for denouncement happens to be.
When they say the attack on Brett, and the complete abandonment of any attempt at fairness. No actual corroboration, no evidence, just “beleive women,” “believe survivors.” We are literally presenting belief and conviction as evidence. Guilt by faith. Denouncement.
A lot of people saw that and said ‘there is nothing to stop anybody from doing the exact same thing to me. To my son’
Apparently Democrats had a 15 point lead among all white women surveyed (I heard this on the radio and I have no idea why it was white women) Democrats and Republicans back in Midseptember. Today they apparently only have a 1 point lead
That’s why. The left has gone so far down the rabbit hole with it’s group identity intersectiona;ism, attacks on free speech and attempts to destroy by denouncement that they have the shit out of anybody paying attention. I look at it, and I see evil.
So, that;s why.
Scylla.
Shut up.
Scylla.
Ignore asahi in the pit.