When we look back on the history books, we see that we have mistreated a lot of folks. Women haven’t been treated equally, people of color haven’t been treated fairly. Gay, lesbian and transgendered people haven’t been treated fairly. Through a modern lens, a lot of what we have done in the past has been unfair towards minority groups. As a Conservative in 2018 USA, do you believe that in the year 2018 we have made all the useful social progress that we are going to make? Or even, that we should revert to a time in the past where things were “better”?
This sounds like a push poll, along the lines of “Do you favor clean water and air?” but I’ll give it a try:
Equality is great, of course, but people’s definition of equality skew widely. Equal treatment or equal outcome? Because, increasingly, there are people who take it to mean the latter rather than the former.
Should women and minorities have the right to vote, etc? Absolutely. Should they be given an advantage that others do not have? No. With affirmative action, there are many black and Hispanic students being given a boost that whites and Asians do not have. Should women be paid the same as men? Sure - if the work, experience, seniority, hazards, hardship are the same.
Also, there are many people today who confuse equal rights with equal characteristics. Women should have the same rights as men, but that does not for one moment mean that they share the same characteristics as men.
I think the advance of individual rights in the US - for minorities, women, and gays - has been a good thing.
I’m now worried about the nuclear family & about the drug epidemic that has actually lowered the expected US lifespan during the last few years. And this is a tough nut to crack. About the family, the illegitimacy rate is very high in the US. This brings many problems with it, including poverty & criminality:
The opioid epidemic & associated deaths are also worrisome:
So, while we’ve made social progress in some hugely important areas, we have other areas where things have become worse.
Note: I’m not a conservative, but a moderate who used to vote Republican. So, I piped up.
“Illegitimacy” is only a problem because we have made it so. There’s no reason we couldn’t have a social and political system—with good public transportation, free health care, free child care, free education, and provision for other basic needs—that would largely wipe out any disadvantages suffered by a child as a result of “illegitimacy.”
The nuclear family is also an artificial construct that has been a norm for only a tiny fraction of civilized humanity. It’s not something we need to provide for greater freedom and equal distribution of resources.
This. The only reason children are punished for not being born to a 2-parent family is because we decided punish them for it.
What you’re saying is basically that the State would take the role of private families. It would be responsible for taking care of people. “cradle to grave”. Furthermore, see, this means that rich private (mostly white) families won’t be able to take care of their kids in as much luxury as they otherwise could because the heavy taxes to pay for all this would take away much of the money needed. And it would mean that many people we currently allow to languish in ignorance and poverty because they aren’t white and christian or in some cases even speak the same language would benefit from a small amount of this money.
Moreover, it means that parents who fail to provide for their children don’t have their children punished with a menial role in society all their lives. The children “deserve” to be poor.
Just saying, think this through. Conservatives don’t want these things, not because they are too stupid to see the benefits, they don’t want them because they believe in certain “principles” they want to apply to everyone else.
Such principles are things like :
a. Breaking the law is evil
b. Not being married when you have children is evil
c. Sex before marriage is evil
d. Not have a decent job and a good income means you’re a fuckup, it is all your fault
e. Being born homosexual is evil
f. Being born black or brown is a character flaw
And so on. Evil should be punished.
I think I get what you’re doing here, but really I’ll just respond to this part. What the state would be doing is creating a baseline that allows everyone the opportunity to succeed without having to struggle for the most basic needs for survival. That would still allow those who apply themselves to succeed, and society would benefit from the productivity of everyone, regardless of their background.
Well, I suppose that if I were arguing with someone who really believed this, I would switch to a utilitarian argument. What kind of environment do you want to live in? One in which the people around are saved from desperation and are empowered to achieve what they are able and motivated to achieve or in which you are surrounded by the desperate and resentful, requiring you to spend much of your resources protecting yourself from them?
An interesting question. I’d call it a strawman because you’re trying to set up pins to knock down. But since you’re trying to tar a group of voters for past sins I’ll answer with a question. I know the anwer but I want you to look it up. Who was the first black Congressman and what party was he in and what year did it take place. Then look up the second black Congressman. Repeat the process. Let us all know how many were voted in before the next party managed it and note the years all this took place. Let me get you started: Senators Congressman
Then look up which party created the KKK to stop voters from electing black people to Congress. Note the timeline above.
And finally, which party kept a high ranking former member of the KKK in Office until he died of old age.
This is the answer to your question of oppression by a political party.
Seriously there ought to be some kind of board rule about anybody with a join date more than 30 minutes ago who pretends not to know about the Southern Strategy
where the Republicans decided to attract all the racists from the Democratic party, successfully completed the strategy, and still hew to it today.
Do seriously not know this? Are you pretending not to know it? Is it because you’d rather not know it?
Blalron used the terms conservative and progressive. Just because those terms now relate to Republican and Democrat respectively, doesn’t mean they always did.
mc
Conservatives want to live in gated communities and have the right to amass their own private arsenals. They (demanded and got) the legal right to gun down people who make them feel threatened without facing charges for the murder. They want more police and mass incarceration and 3 strikes and you’re out. That is, instead of helping the poor, they primarily desire that the poor who act out and who don’t simply eke out the meager existence they are permitted to be jailed forever or shot.
Their primary arguments against your ideas are:
a. The government is inefficient and corrupt. If you were to tax every American heavily and poor the money into helping the poor, would fail to do so in any meaningful way.
b. The poor are lazy. Giving them stuff will just encourage them to be more lazy.
c. The poor breed like rabbits and can’t control their rates of reproduction. Due to the math of exponential growth, if you don’t starve them of resources, you’re just creating a bigger problem. (this, unfortunately, is one of those arguments that is both abhorrent and yet I cannot deny the math on it checks out)
Not just them. Look at history and you’ll see that it’s anyone different.
I’m not a conservative and I’m not in the USA, but I suggest you take a longer-term view through your lens and see that the whole of history is the story of humanity becoming better. The introductions of religion, slavery, laws, currency, philosophy, and so on.
We’re getting better; it’s just taking longer than we thought.
Absent actually showing the math, I’m guessing you haven’t actually checked the math because you don’t actually find it abhorrent.
The less uncertainty people face overall, the fewer children they tend to have. What statistics make you think otherwise?
It is not a matter of trying to equalize outcomes, but to give people equal opportunities.
One of the problems with trying to determine what equal opportunity means is that there are many, many variables involved to try to sort through.
So, sometimes, people look to the outcomes, and if they see that a particular demographic consistently gets lower outcomes, then the look to the increase the opportunities, to try to even things out.
So, when you say that we are trying to equalize the outcomes, you are not 100% wrong, just 98%, in that no, that is not what we are doing, that is not what we are trying to do, and that is not the philosophy or mentality that we operate under, no matter how often the right wing propaganda that you listened to tells you so.
However, as to that 2% that you are correct on, yes, we do notice that outcomes between different demographic groups do have much larger disparities than mere chance or fortune should allow, so we do look into how to change that.
What is more difficult, IMHO, than trying to find the best ways to give people an equal playing field, is trying to convince people that they do get advantages by the unequal playing field.
True, and the right wing likes to throw that in there in order to try to distract from the effects of the societal and institutional discrimination that they support.
Oh, I had no idea that the republican party was the party of Lincoln. Not many people know that, I’ve heard. [/s]
Sad, sad, sad times that they have fallen on though, what with having a Nazi sympathizer as the leader of their party.
Since you were so educational with your links just now, can you please explain what happened to change the party that freed the slaves to become the party that runs on racism?
Yes there are differences between people, but as we are all human beings, our similarities far outweigh our differences.
And it’s no mystery why those who seem to harp on the differences are the ones generally benefiting from unfair advantages.
And for purposes of policy, it matters less what might be the characteristics of a woman as compared to a man but that a woman not be hindered from making choices or claiming opportunities based on someone else’s opinion or assumption of what her characteristics are or should be.
I think this question is poorly phrased as it implies Conservatives are not for social progress. For example, if we look at the history books, it was the Democrats who mostly opposed process on the civil rights bills. If we look at communist movements they were from the left and smothered what we would call our bill of rights. Such facts would imply it its the left, not the right who is anti-social progress.
Progress, after all, is a point of view. I don’t think either liberals or conservatives want to go back to the 1930s
If you ask a conservative, I think he or she is for natural progress that does not impede his or her beliefs. They are most likely against social engineering and quotas for what the liberals might view as progress as it takes away from someone else.
The nuclear family being the building block of western civilization for hundreds of years is not bad for a johnny-come-lately artificial construct. And poverty is higher for single-parent homes in the US & Europe. We have poverty programs, just like Europe. But those programs don’t overcome the association of illegitimacy with poverty.
Children in single-mother families have extremely high poverty
rates — in all countries and in all country clusters. The marketincome child poverty rate varies from 72%, on average, in the Anglophone countries (with a stunningly high rate of nearly 81% in Ireland), to 60–62% in the Eastern European and Continental countries,
and 52–55% in Latin American and Nordic countries. The most favorable rate across the 20 countries, still a markedly high 47%, is reported
in Denmark. Using the market-income standard, the greater poverty
risk associated with living with a single mother is especially marked
in the Continental countries — where, on average, children in
single-mother families are about six times as likely to be poor as are
children in two-parent families. Remarkably, in the Netherlands, the
market-income poverty rate among the children of single mothers
is nearly nine times the poverty rate among children who live with
two parents.
Taxes and transfers, of course, reduce child poverty across all
family types. Yet, even with post-tax-and-transfer income, family
structure still matters a great deal. Disposable-income poverty is
nearly everywhere lowest among children in two-parent families.
Among these children, the risk of poverty is highest (nearly 30%) in
the Latin American cluster, followed by the Anglophone and Eastern
European countries (10–11%), the Continental group (8%), and the
Nordic countries (a much lower 3%). The children of single mothers,
compared to the children of two parents, are (on average) three to
four as likely to be poor in each of the country clusters — with the exception of the Latin America group where they are only slightly more
likely to be poor.
What we understand today as the “nuclear family” is a man a woman and their children together. That is not a model that has been idealized or common for more than a few decades.
Families were considered in much broader terms as western civilization flourished—grandparents, aunts, uncles, adoptees, wards, attached serving folk. And all those people had close connections throughout their community to create networks of support. Marriages were often unstable—husbands or wives left for new lovers or were unreliable because of alcoholism. They were replaced by informal replacements—“maiden aunts” and “confirmed bachelors.” Children stayed with their parents and grandparents throughout their lives. Grandparents substituted for unreliable parents.
This was a generous, flexible system of family, not at all like the mean, anaemic concept of a nuclear family rooted in false nostalgia for the 1950s.
Again, none of this has anything to do with any natural, inherent characteristic of “illegitimacy” but only the deliberately small-minded social institutions we have built to punish it.