The broader part of that conversation started with a discussion about Melania’s Anti-bullying campaign, to which I said not much had been done. My mother insisted she has done all kinds of this and that, it is just that the media doesn’t report on it, and I said, “Alright, what has she done that the media haven’t reported?” She couldn’t name a single solitary thing. My opinion of Melania’s lack of substance comes from the fact that she hasn’t shown the American people that she has any.
I’m not gong to let you draw me into a pissing match, the point I was making was that I, like the OP, am having a hard time accepting the way some Republican voters around me are acting, and doubly worse, they happen to be people that I love and KNOW to be decent people because I have seen past evidence of it.
There are certainly different ideas among Conservatives and Liberals in what defines fairness. In my mind I don’t see one argument as right and another as wrong, but in my experience
Conservatives define fairness as:
Equality means equality, so everyone should be treated exactly the same. That means no special set-asides for minorities or women. You get in here in this tank and sink or swim with everyone else. The people doing the best work will be the most rewarded and will rise to the top. That is why Conservatives get so irritated with special programs and such. It makes them feel like there is no special group speaking for them, so that feels unfair. It feels like tearing one group down to lift another one up rather than bringing everyone to the same starting line.
Liberals define fairness as:
Inequalities are too great to just throw everyone in the tank to sink or swim because some people already know how to swim and others don’t and will drown. In order to give everyone a fair chance, we are going to make sure those who don’t know how to swim are going to get extra attention and resources so they are brought up to the level of the best swimmers. Sure, the mediocre swimmers who never got any extra resources and attention are going to be the ones to drown, but it feels fair because the people who needed the most attention got it and the mediocre swimmers should have made better life choices.
I see advantages and flaws in both ideologies. Sure, we have to help “level the playing field” to use that overly-used phrase, but we also have to acknowledge that not everyone in the “privileged” group is the same and some of those might need a little boost too. And you also can’t be so progressive that you actually encourage dependence on the system. Social safety nets are great and necessary, but people move the fastest when there’s a little fire under their ass.
Grumbacher Red, you have fallen for racist propaganda. Racists don’t announce to the world that they hate blacks; they construct alternate realities in which their grievances seem fair.
Only in a pretend-world are whites discriminated against, as the neo-Nazis would have you believe.
I didn’t say anything about race, nor did I say I agreed or disagreed wholly with one or another. I said these are the lines of thinking in the 2 groups.
Annnd, I assure you I haven’t been hanging out with neo-Nazis or coming close to falling for propaganda. I know that when I see it. It seems to me this is the very problem so many of us are encountering in this Trump era and exactly what the OP was ranting about. That we can’t even have a compare and contrast discussion to try and get to the heart of differences without jumping way out to the fringe.
I am willing to listen to someone else’s point of view, I can handle an opinion I don’t agree with and not judge a person. We need healthy intellectual intercourse, and that means trying to understand a variety of personal experiences. I am not citing studies and statistics, I am just talking about what I see and hear, and I am interested in what others see and hear.
Well I see and hear that Trump is a total failure as POTUS. He hasn’t accomplished any of his stupid agendas, not even 1. He has made the USA a joke around the globe. He doesn’t give a bloody rats ass about 6 pack Joe and his middle-class problems. And, sad to say they are who put him in office. A day of reckoning will come. I hope it ain’t gonna be war or some other disaster.
I have no problem with humane and intelligent conservative opinions.
@ Grumbacher Red - The present GOP Senate has confirmed Betsy DeVos and Scott Pruitt for cabinet posts, just to name two of the most obviously egregious examples. What do you think of these appointments?
@ any conservative reading this - The present GOP Congress has come close to repealing Obamacare, with no serious plan for replacing it, other than disrupting the insurance business and throwing millions off insurance. What do you think of that?
@ any conservative reading this - America has never been more prosperous than it is now, and corporations have never been more profitable. Income inequality has never been this bad since the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression; soon there will be individual Americans with 12-digit net worths — that’s Hundred Billion Dollars with an H. (The Koch Brothers together are already worth more than this; the Walton kids together are worth even more.) Yet the present GOP Congress believes the #1 priority is further tax cuts for the rich. What’s your view on this?
@ any conservative reading this - what’s your view on the Muslim ban? What’s your view on the woman being held against her will in Texas to prevent her from paying for an abortion?
Any genuine conservative with conscience and intelligence should now be denouncing the present Republican as loud as he can.
Thank you for your informed and well thought out opinion.
Your premonition about our post-Trump life is a bit sad, but it will take a long time to undo the damage that Trump and his CEO butt buddies have done to us.
I really can’t thank you enough for putting these words together in such a well thought out and well delivered manner. This should be required reading for any political person.
I have two friends, both of whom I admire and respect a great deal, who are moderate Republicans. Neither one can stand Trump.
I also recently read Jeff Flake’s book, and while there were a few things I wanted to call him out on, and I certainly don’t agree with him on most issues, for the most part he seems like a decent human being.
So yeah, I can respect Republicans - they need to EARN my respect, and if they defend Trump there’s no way in hell I can think well of them, but it is certainly possible for me to regard them as principled people.
This is too sad. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but there is some kind of shit going on here. DJT is a conman at best. In reality he is a bullying man-child that brags about molesting women.
What is wrong with the 63 million people that voted for him? I don’t get it, Did a black president enrage the racist vote? Did a possible female presidential candidate enrage the misogynistic vote? Did a White Supremacist win the White House because 63 million of our neighbors want to be proud to be racist?
If you voted for Trump, you might just be a racist.
That just seems to be a fancy way of saying that “Conservatives are racist jerks and Liberals are moral ethical people”, which I don’t think is particularly helpful or true. Conservatives and Liberals are not two fundamentally different species of people.
I believe that in general, Conservatives were people for whom historically the traditional concept of what “America” is has largely worked for them. Typically rural folk with long-standing ties to their communities and suburbanites whose hard work has afforded them a relatively affluent lifestyle.
Liberals tend to be people who for whatever reason, the standard concept of “America” is not working for them. Minorities. Gays. Poor people. Smart people who just didn’t “fit” in their rural communities and left for more urban areas.
The reason that Liberals generate such animosity with Conservatives is that Conservatives are largely the ones who see their lifestyle having to change to accommodate the Liberals. From the perspective of Conservatives:
They see themselves as just normal people who go to work every day so they can support their families
When they look at groups like OWS, they see a bunch of lazy, dirty, entitled, unemployed hipsters sitting on their ass in Zucotti Park with their iPads harassing anyone in a suit.
When they see their taxes increase, they seem corrupt government transferring their wealth to buy votes with little real impact
When they see social justice warriors picking on people for a particular Halloween costume, they see bullies who are an affront to the First Amendment.
When they see Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem, they see an entitled millionaire shitting on the American flag.
They see the constant accusations of “racism” as a race-baiting witch hunt. They also see Liberals playing the “race card” to give a free pass when people of a certain color commit crimes.
When they see a mass shooting on TV, that just reinforces their belief that they need more guns to protect themselves. The more anti-gun protests they see, the more in convinces them that they need their guns as a check against overly liberal policies that will marginalize them and redistribute their wealth.
Now, I believe that rank and file conservatives are a different animal than the Republican Party and their propaganda machine at Fox News and Breitbart. I believe that those groups represent a relatively small party of the extremely wealthy who intentionally exacerbated political divisiveness for their own gains.
Do you object to the demonisation of Republicans here? If not, why not? Does that make you a hypocrite?
Like praise corporates helping out in Florida (see here), do disaster relief, serve in the military?
Wow. Get over yourself (so should they). You are not so different (neither are they). I’ll bet that you agree with those Republicans on most things and disagree with them on but a few, but those few things are those you find significant. You are not going to persuade them - nor they you - by being a dick. Fight their ignorance by fighting your own.
So you are a proud Republican. You don’t have any problem with calling out Democrats as being uncaring, inconsiderate people. Your words. And you think that people choose about how they treat others and how they view the political landscape.
You voted for Trump. Your asinine excuses and your craven excuses for fucking over your neighbor don’t mean shit to anyone else but another Trump voter.
You might have been a good person in your previous life, but you voted for Trump. You voted for someone that will take away money from your children’s education. You voted for someone that will take away safe drinking water and safe air from your children. You voted for someone that will make a college education for your children so expensive that only the 1% of our population can afford it.
I don’t know you, I don’t know if you have children. I will tell you what I do know about you. You voted for Trump. You voted against a woman’s right to choose about what happens to her body. You voted for the ‘Religious Right’ to come into my life and the lives of millions of others. You voted for the NRA to continue making money by selling guns to people that really don’t need them.
Since you voted for Trump, why don’t you just tell people to keep smoking cigarettes? Cancer isn’t all that bad. You voted to keep coal miners employed so they can keep risking their lives to dig out a product that isn’t a sustainable product. Since your president seems to think that coal mining is such a valued profession, I guess that taxpayers should also pay money to make certain coal fired plants buy the coal that Trump is so happy to have other people die for.
You voted for Trump. So now our preschooler president is calling a Nuclear Capable Nation derogatory names. Little Rocket Man. How proud your choice of a president is that he made up such a quaint name for a nuclear equipped nation.I can’t see a downside there.
So you voted for Trump. You have too much pride to admit that you were stupid to vote for him. It is ok. Everyone knows that you are a dumb ass because you keep trying to defend Trump’s actions. Do you get off when Trump takes away health care from a million people? Do you get off when Trump slashes the budgets of social safety nets for our most impoverished people so that he can justify giving tax benefits to the richest people in the world?
So you voted for Trump. What did you think an Oligarch would do our lives?
I said earlier that pre-Trump I would have called myself center-right. Now I am very strongly center-left and leaning moreso everyday. I voted for Hilary, not because I was really all that in love with her as a candidate, but because I felt she was the better of the 2 choices I had before me. Even mother had to acknowledge Trump’s weaknesses back during the campaign, and she said said she believed he would get into office and surround himself with competent people, experts in their fields, and they would have this grand collaborative, and it would be a beautiful gut-busting disruption of all the stagnation in Washington.
And what has Trump done? Appointed hard-righters and know-nothings that he doesn’t listen to anyway. He certainly has not assembled this much hoped-for Dream Team. He doesn’t do his homework, he listens to no one, he undermines his own spokes people…has to make everything about him. The guy truly thinks he is the smartest man in the room and he actually thinks he is this fine Gentleman with fine manners, when he is offensive and odious. I don’t feel i have to list examples, ya’ll know what they are.
He’s delusional and gross and dangerous. I have a conscience and I am intelligent and I have been denouncing him for a long time. That is why I myself and a few others are finding ourselves outliers at the present moment in our family, and I fear it is permanent.
I haven’t had a political discussion with Mama, my sister or BIL or anyone else familial in well over a month, and that’s because I have been avoiding them. I don’t see how anybody can defend him as his words and actions get more horrific and embarrassing every day.
I do, however find myself wondering, with each new incident, “Alright Mother…how ya gonna defend THAT?”
Yeah. It is really sad. And this is the same woman who I can recall sitting around our dinner table when I was growing up and us having very good debates about all kinds of things. She used to be fairly open-minded, but as she has gotten older, I have watched her mind just close up and retreat into wierdo places. And she’s not that old, she is only 70. She was one of the people who taught me to be kind and not judge other people, so I am puzzled for sure.
She hasn’t been the same since my Stepfather, who was the love of her life died 25 years ago. It’s been a slow slide, with Trump accelerating it greatly. My Stepfather was a moderate Republican, very active in local and city government, and she thinks by hanging onto Republican ideology she is somehow honoring his memory, but what I have tried to tell her is that he would be ashamed of the far-right way she is acting.
I said, “Mama! Go dig him up out of the cemetery right now, I tell him that and he would slap you into next week! He would not recognize this Republican party!”
I know he wouldn’t. He would probably be turning Democrat right now. I remember my parents had this big fight when Jimmy Carter was running for Gov of Georgia. Daddy campaigned and voted for him, ad when he won, Mama sat in the floor and cried. But we got through that, and everybody knew it wasn’t the end of the damn world. Now I am not so sure.
Well, some of it is those differences in ideas about fairness I already said upthread.
And some of it is what I said in a thread called “Health Care Tirade” in the Pit started by Wesley Clark.
I said that, unfortunately you have many people who are less educated, with less of a work ethic, with less inclination to do the hard work it takes to be an informed person these days, parroting things they heard their parents and grandparents complaining about decades ago when they were children, which probably may have been legitimate complaints at that time. But they aren’t legitimate gripes any more now that they are grown, and these working class complaints don’t apply in the present day, yet these folks are still sitting around saying this outdated crap and they look crazy as a sprayed roach saying it.
It is just a lack of keeping up with modern politics and the way the parties have changed.
I wish I had a better answer, but that’s my reporting from the inside.
I agree with everything else in your post, but to be fair Patx2 didn’t say that. She said the opposite, “I would never have the audacity to ask if people that vote Democrat are uncaring, inconsiderate people.” i.e. she does not consider Democrats to be uncaring, inconsiderate people.