That is a remarkably uninformed picture of what is happening in China.
The economic growth of China is built on pegging their currency to the dollar so that they can enjoy cheap manufacturing (having a billion peasants also helps keep labor costs low). What you call “exploitation” is actually a major demographic shift from a mostly agrarian nation to a modern industrialized one. This has brought both opportunity as well as challenges, as did the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America.
One of the concerns is whether China was undergoing a real estate bubble as these massive “ghost cities” designed to hold millions of people sprang up overnight. Another concern comes from the challenges that come with millions of Chinese suddenly demanding a standard of living on par with Western industrialized nations and what that means in terms of pollution and resource consumption.
But overall, I think the general consensus is that hundreds of millions of Chinese not living in mud huts anymore is a generally good thing.
Labor laws are far less favorable to unions than they once were. And if a President asked congress to end social security these days, they would. This is a major shift from ten years ago even.
On the other hand, gay rights have grown extremely fast. Civil rights have declined with the anti-voting laws.
Texas has figured out how to avoid the “birthright” clause of the 14th amendment. I just read in the Times that for a couple years they will not issue a birth certificate for a newborn when the parents are undocumented. So they are also undocumented and will not be allowed to go to school, when are that age. If this spread, it is clear that congress will not act.
For me the answer is that we’re much more conservative: in terms of being determined to exert as much control over as many people in the the most efficient manner possible.
Am in complete agreement about the erosion of privacy msmith537 - I’m just saying that we now have the tools to keep tabs on everyone in a way that wouldn’t have even felt necessary 50 years ago. I guess my litmus test for whether we’re a more liberal world than we were decades ago is the sense of a loss, rather than an expansion of personal freedom.
One problem is people can’t even agree what these terms mean anymore. It’s not helped when parties say one thing and do another and people have contradictory beliefs. Eventually someone will reference what some Frenchmen thought 200 years ago as the* true* meaning. For all the relevance that has to the modern world you might as well cite the optimates and populares. Later, someone will want to argue what a buzzword like “freedom” even means, since both sides say they want to increase freedom. It means whatever you want it to.
Is a surveillance state conservative because being paranoid about threats both external and internal is conservative? Or is it liberal because it means big government and nosing into citizen’s lives for their own good? Or is it just something that governments do because they can and it doesn’t matter if it’s totalitarian left or right? Good luck, have fun.
Conservatives say they love free markets. Liberals say they love regulations to preserve the free market and consumers. But both only apply to the little people. The cool kids get crony capitalism, subsidies, corporate welfare, regulators looking the other way, policies to crush their competition, etc. Others would say “crony” is an extraneous word. The far right and far left don’t like the third way crap that does violence to both their ideologies. So, is that more liberal or more conservative?
Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives aren’t the same, but it’s awfully blurry. Tells you something about the root words. Privatization of industry and services has been a big trend. Labor has been in a coma for decades. Communism is dead. So if you want to go with stereotypes you could say America at least is way more economically conservative than it used to be. In the 1960s people could at least pretend communism was a threat if the hippies weren’t reined in.
But conservatives don’t want to control people. They’re for limited government and personal liberty.
OK, I almost said that with a straight face. You see the problem though?
I just think that the world seems to be progressing on some science/medicine/technological trajectory that was initially exciting, like running away with the circus, but I think the circus is running away with us.
I guess the answer to the question hinges on which opposing term you assign ‘fucked-up’ as a synonymous definition
The idea that today’s right-wingers would want bring us back to the 1950s is hilarious, since that was a decade when the top marginal tax rate was 91%. I realize there are different ways you can gloss that figure, but the fact remains that it’s more than double today’s rate, therefore “conservatives” should want to run in terror from the 1950s.
I’m in general agreement with the OP, given that corporate power is far more expansive than it used to be. (Plus organized labor is much weaker, wages are basically stagnant, the prison industry is much more massive etc.).
Not in Latin America. 30-40 years ago most of Latin America was military dictatorships which were very right wing and were supported by imperialistic powers. Now many are democracies with socialistic governments.
Kent State (I know, exceeds th OP by five years). More conservative today because I can’t imagine college kids protesting anything to that extent (and which has no direct bearing on their lives: the young men had deferments even before Nixon ended the draft).
But more liberal: we tend to forget how common was the reaction “serves them right! Shoot them!” Today middle-America don’t see college as a place where only the lucky others go.
Or more pragmatic conservative? “Don’t shoot those college kids! Somebody’s got to get good jobs and pay the taxes to support us!”
“I can’t imagine college kids protesting anything to that extent”
No, they’ll just throw hissy fits if someone not left leaning enough is asked to speak on campus or if something in their textbooks or course curriculum triggers them on some leftist issue.
I think the reason “today’s ‘revolutionaries’ tend to be right wingers” is a direct response to how liberal the world has gotten. The conservatives, rightly, see their world disappearing and so they go on the warpath to try and save that world from, liberals, secularism, science, anything they see as killing it.
Their world view is “wouldn’t it be great to go back to that time when everyone agreed with me?”
What they almost never understand is that the world they miss never existed. They lived in a world where everyone within earshot either agreed with them or was too scared to speak up. Now the world has gotten smaller so there are a lot more people within “earshot” and the silenced minorities aren’t being silent anymore and they think someone stole their world. And they want it back.
