In a Pit thread, @MrDibble talked about how racism cannot be overcome through the “Magic of Liberalism”, and said this about America’s civil rights era:
Now, I agree with MrDibble that, clearly, America’s civil rights era is not over, and that racism is by no means a solved problem in America, or anything of the sort.
To me, this represents a failure to live up to Liberal values. Both because some of the people in the Liberal movement were imperfect, and didn’t live up to their own ideals; as well as because of pushback against Liberalism.
But based on MrDibble’s criticism, as well as other things he has said, he clearly disagrees, and believes that Liberalism itself is part of the problem. And other posters have expressed similar opinions, like this one:
What exactly do you think America should have done differently during the civil rights era that would have meant that “racists were not largely tolerated”? There are plenty of things that I think could have been done, but they mostly amount to ways that Liberalism’s solutions could have been applied more strongly. Since you critique liberalism, what illiberal solutions would you have favored?
Can you give some specific, concrete actions that America should have taken that would have prevented this?
It’s very simple to critique power by finger wagging and claiming they didn’t do enough to stop racism. But how should power have been wielded to actually materially impact racism?
Correct, did you read the quoted post from Sandwich where they used “liberal” pejoratively and said “liberals” shouldn’t consider themselves “on the left”? I’m talking to people of that political persuasion.
I know the answers conservatives or liberals would give to the question; I’m not particularly interested in the opinion of people to the right of conservatives because I’ve long ago written off that entire part of the political spectrum as awful; that just leaves people who are left of Liberalism.
Okay, fine. The word “liberal” has so many meanings as to be practically useless, not least because what some in the US mean by “liberal” includes Obama and the Clintons, who in most of the world would be centre-right.
A left approach to civil rights would include a strong commitment to and action on economic equality. See, for example, MLK’s calls for socialism.
…you can open another thread if you want to debate that question, but for the purposes of this thread, I’ll say that I don’t think that’s true at all; I see this floated often and I think it greatly oversells both how left Europe is as well as how right Democrats are.
That said, it’s definitely a debate for another thread. I just wanted to note that what you say there is disputed, not settled fact.
How would implementing socialism address racism in the American population?
Remember, the claim I am responding to is that because liberalism tolerated racists, we still have a big racism problem in America today. What would implementing socialism do to address this?
Not an especially god faith question, since the obvious people whom to address this question are the minorities who’d benefit from Civil Rights. Whenever they have been asked, the answer is basically “get your foot off our necks.”
Apparently there is a backstory here that I did not participate in. Older, white, upper middle class male here. I’m pretty consistently on the left end of the generally liberal folk I associate with, Tho, around here, I’ve been chastised for not supporting some liberal causes sufficiently.
2 things I strongly support are eliminating property tax as the primary funder of education, and encouraging quotas for school admittance and workplace hiring and promoting of historically disadvantaged groups.
As others have said, “liberal” has an awful lot of different definitions. I think you need to offer the one you are using in this thread for a coherent debate to take place.
I very clearly don’t mean that, because people like Obama and even quite a bit to the left of him aren’t the sort of people to say “you’re not really on the Left if you’re a Liberal”. So, obviously, they’re not who I am talking about.
Does even someone like AOC or Bernie say that? I’ve never heard them do so.
I’m fairly certain they’ve given all manners of answers that were far more detailed than that and which spanned the entire political spectrum. If you want to point out that white Socialists tend to answer one way while leftists from minority groups answer differently (or alternatively, that they’re overwhelmingly on the same page) that would be on topic. I’m not sure how that’s ‘bad faith’.