If we don’t allow conservatives on this board, we’ll be losing an opportunity to dissuade some of them from their wicked wicked ways.
Fair point.
We’ll also risk mistakenly believing with smug satisfaction that we’ve won the argument.
Maybe? There’s also the chance that I might be persuaded to change my views. It has happened with conservatives on this board. Not any of the ones that end up in Pit threads routinely, but it has happened.
That regularly happens anyway. See @Jimmy_Chitwood’s post.
It’s possible that some progressive ideas that are unlikely to work now might actually work if the right wing weren’t so hellbent on damaging faith in political collectivism.
Like the 3.5 trillion dollar real infrastructure deal proposed by House progressives, for instance. Do I think we can honestly afford it right now? No, but that’s not because the entire thing is a waste of taxpayer money - some of it might be, but not all. The real problem is, it’s easier now to spend money on things we probably don’t need as much of, like excessive military spending, than it is to raise revenue to pay for things we really do need, such as more robust education and infrastructure.
Do I think we’re approaching serious inflationary pressure and a weaker dollar? Yes, but not because of socialism - not unless you count the socialization of economic losses whenever financial institutions crash the markets and cause credit freezes. If we say that socialized capitalism doesn’t work, it’s mainly because the right wing has had more power over the last 40 years and they’ve done everything possible to ensure that it can’t work.
I’m a big fan of misapplying barely understood concepts to large scale events, so I’m gonna say we’re essentially seeing the Hegelian dialectic at play here, for the 2nd time in my life. The first is when the contradictions of the New Deal society: bureaucratic overload, top-down directions across too many sectors of society, etc., became unwieldy and misery-creating 40 years later, by the late 1970s. This caused the societal pendulum to swing back to the right (for, after all, America is a center-right country, like it or not). Now, 40 years later, the contradictions in the New Rights vision: income inequality, almost zero social safety net, a need for victims, and a hollowed-out government (which was eventually unable to protect the citizenry against COVID) are coming to fruit.
This is why I’m no longer interested in really listening to conservative solutions. As I have explained, at length, the issues facing today’s society are a simple result of the failures and contradictions of conservative policy as it has been enacted from Carter through Trump.
Biden, so far, doesn’t seem to buy it.
Anyway, gotta go, my $.02.
It’s not that. It’s that the advantages that the US had post WWII that obfuscated inefficiencies have been eroded by globalization and the discrepancy between the mobility of labor vs capital.
How do you propose to solve this? Increase mobility of labour à la EU, or reverse decades of US international policy by reintroducing capital controls?
I don’t understand this sentiment at all. Perhaps I am too isolated in middle class New England, but I cannot think of a single minority group that was better off in the 40s (or even the 80s) than today. Though there is still a long, long way to go, things are demonstrably better for women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ individuals, etc. Am I just being too optimistic?
Things are better, but there’s a concrete effort underway to roll things back. The people pushing the rollback, though, are much more careful in how they frame the arguments. While there was a time in America (or western culture in general, your mileage may vary from country to country) where the laws, state and federal, could actually say “non-white people can’t do so-and-so” and “anyone caught engaging in homosexual acts is barred from yadda yadda” (to say nothing of businesses denying women their own credit cards or bank accounts into the seventies), most things are being attacked obliquely, “election security” laws being the most prominent. Though I guess the “bathroom laws” targeting trans people are a bit more explicit in their prejudices, but they still come at it from a bit of an angle.
(sorry if I’m repeating stuff…this if my first time in this particular thread and I haven’t read all 2000+ entries)
I am not saying that there aren’t threats and huge areas for improvement. Of course there are, and they are real threats that need to be fought tooth and nail. I am just saying that we on the left tend to forgot just how far we have come in a relatively short time. In the 90s it would have been political suicide for even a democrat to push for legalized gay marriage in a national campaign. In 2020, even Trump, with all his awfulness, didn’t make a case to repeal gay marriage. Interracial marriages were illegal in about 15 states until the late 60s. A transsexual student was just this week awarded $1.3 million in damages from his school for their refusal to allow him access to the bathroom. These are things to be celebrated, and shoved in the faces of the opponents to equality. Suggesting that things have reverted back to the 40s ignores some incredible gains.
I feel that a number of things are under attack or have actually been changed - reproductive rights, voting rights, separation of church and state - but I think most of all I feel that there’s this huge momentum behind making those changes, rolling things back. It’s disheartening to think of all the fights that seemed finished that need to be started again.
You are right that I enjoy rights and protections that I did not have in the 40s or 50s. They just seem very flimsy right now, as if they might vanish.
I can sense and appreciate the worry in your post. You have a perspective that I am, from my demographics and where I live, very insulated from (ignorant of?). Thank you for sharing.
Texas is about to make abortions all but impossible to get.
"A group of abortion providers and advocates including Planned Parenthood is asking the Supreme Court to temporarily block the enforcement of a Texas law that would ban most abortions after as early as six weeks of pregnancy.
Petitioners say the law, which is set to take effect Wednesday, would essentially overturn the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that enshrined the right of women to choose to have an abortion."
I’m really not ok with this.
Does some conservative here defend the law?
I mean, I could defend the state’s right to make & enforce that law. But I don’t think the law is a moral one.
Btw the standard is planned parenthood, not roe v wade.
~Max
Exactly, and it furthers the impression that the social justice crowd have run out of “real” issues to get worked up over and are now making things up/blowing things out of proportion.
Outright “I’m firing you from your job for being black/a woman/gay”-type discrimination has been illegal for decades (and rightly so), and while there’s still some things which need shoring up, this hyperbole that we’re going back to the 1940s is simply not true and unhelpful, despite what people with unnatural hair colours want everyone to think.
That’s not actually the case in the majority of the US, at least as far as LGBT protections. 27 states have no protections at all against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
That’s unfortunate indeed, although good that 23 states have laws against LGBT discrimination. Most other Western countries have anti-discrimination laws on the books and have done for ages, which is why it’s incredibly frustrating dealing with social justice activists using talking points imported from the US (and therefore irrelevant to Not America) and trying to make issues out of things that really aren’t a genuine problem in the Not American country.
Yeah. I’m also guilty of forgetting that rights and things that are settled and uncontroversial here are still live issues in the US, and they are not just making a fuss over nothing. But it is frustrating when we get talking points imported from America that make so sense, and activists bringing up things that are at most an extremely tiny issue in the UK. We have our own problems and we should be trying to solve them, not blindly copying a bigger country because it’s what we see on social media.