Since this thread needs a reminder, here is soon-to-be-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s memo which IMHO ushered in this new era of RW-style “discourse”:
I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the MMM, but I thought Farrakhan’s MMM was an appeal for a return to traditional family vaules as a means of strengthening the black community, reducing substance abuse, reducing out-of-wedlock births/single-parent homes, etc. IOW, an appeal for black men to reenter into traditional family constructs.
To my way of seeing things, that would be more conservative that liberal.
From where I stand, Farrakhan’s a loon, but in this instance (the MMM), the message was good, and his lunatic fanaticism didn’t invalidate the message.
Ah, a blast from the past! Haven’t seen that list of quotes for some years, most folks would be too embarrassed to bring it up. And a Ted Kennedy/Chappaquidick reference? He’s dead, you know. Might be time to let that go, don’t you think? Or don’t you?
But as charming as this bit of nostalgia may be, the point is about people who still believe. Hell, I once thought Jim Morrison was a poet. I got over it.
So, if you are going to offer this…stuff… in support of Starving Artist’s contention about “lots of people” believing it, what you need is a bunch of people making current statements. You know, like, recently. Now, if SA had said something like a lot of folks did believe it, he would be on solid ground.
But he didn’t, now did he, buckaroo?
I think the OP is making the mistake of thinking the RW crazy rhetoric is the reason that the right continues to do as well as it does. I think it’s more likely that there are a lot of rational people who are right of center (I hope that I am one of them). Don’t confuse the symptom for the cause.
I’m assuming you mean moderately conservative, what used to be a “Republican”. You don’t have a party anymore. Now, you either get on the Crazytown bus, or you watch it leave without you.
Well, if you’re going to insist upon a literal reading of what I said, then I suppose I should point out that I said lots of people believe it, not that lots of people are currently posting it on the internet. 
And tomndebb, to get back to the issue of right vs. left hatemongering, a better way to describe the difference came to me just now. It’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it last night. First lets recap some of your right-wing slurs from forty-two to ninety years ago, half of which are either reiterations of what came before them or so lame as to be laughable:
treason
traitor
unAmerican
commie
pinko
fellow traveller
uppity
“mixing races”
“America: Love it or leave it”
peacenik.
Now let’s look at the slurs directed toward the right, constantly, for the last forty years, and propogated by a wealth of electronic media that didn’t exist during the time frame you reference:
morons
open mouthed knuckkle-draggers
hateful
selfish
racist
sexist
homophobes
rightards
rich
wanting to see people poor people staving/dying in the streets
etc.
Now, do you see a difference there? Notice that the insults from some of the people on the right all those years ago refer to actions taken by a certain group of people at a certain time and in relation to certain issues. With regard to the liberal insults which have been going on nonstop for the last forty years and coming from all quarters of the left, we have insults aimed at conservatives as a whole and focusing on their mental or character traits. So the difference is obvious, and can be summed up as follows:
“Conservatives think liberals do bad things; liberals think conservatives are bad people.”
And IMO the latter creates much more hatred, on both sides, than does the former.
See? Now here we have more of the same. You simply can’t be a Republican these days unless you’re “crazy”. :rolleyes:
By the way, you got an answer to my question yet, or are you about to get really, really busy?
Are you saying that 40 years ago, racism, sexism, and homophobia were not prevalent beliefs among conservatives?
40 years ago they were probably prevalent beliefs among ‘liberals’ as well, no?
-XT
The point is that calling someone racist may not be a slur, especially given the time period we’re talking about. It very well may be a factual statement. Is (or was) it uncivil to say Strom Thurmond was a racist when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 26 hours?
Compare that to the term “unamerican,” which is widely recognized to be a meaningless term thrown around with no other purpose than to do harm to someone’s reputation.
Well, my point was that 40 or so years ago, most people, whether they were ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ probably had more than a dollop of all of those things (and not just Americans). So, saying that 40 years ago it was prevalent for ‘conservatives’ to have those tendencies is pretty meaningless, since most of the population did, no matter what their political leanings were…and no matter what they said on the subject.
Similar to the term ‘fascist’ that seems to get throw at conservatives periodically by the more loony elements of the left. It’s all of a piece, since disparaging terms are designed to, well, disparage folks who one group disagrees with.
We could fill up a book with the meaningless terms and hyperbole that both sides hurl at each other in an attempt to belittle the other side and win the argument (whatever it is) by fiat. Having the LW hurl MORE vitriol (as if they don’t hurl any today or for the last few decades) is not going to be measurably more helpful…in fact, as I said earlier it will not only further poison the political environment in the US but will only further hurt them and make them less credible with the centrists. Personally, I think a wiser course for the non-loony bin LWers is to be reasoned, measured and sane…it might come as a contrast to the loony RWers and may actually give the left some traction with the center. Especially if they manage to rein in their loony element and muzzle them.
Or, the LW can try to one up the RW with more vitriol and foam and see how that works out.
-XT
No, I’m not gonna waste my time looking for cites that don’t exist and would prove nothing if they did, and yes, as a matter of fact I am about to get really busy.
Like xtisme said, they were prevalent among just about everybody forty years ago, and they are probably as much less prevalent now among conservatives as they are among liberals. And besides, being called on genuine racism isn’t, in my opinion, a bad thing. It’s when it gets applied with a broad brush, or when racism is non-existent, as in the case of people with legitimate questions or objections about such things as affirmative action or forced busing, that it becomes hate speech. Also, most of the accusations of racism I see coming from the left aren’t in regard to specific acts of racism by specific people, they’re attempts to portray all conservatives as racist for no reason other than that they’re conservatives. That is hate speech.
“Conservatives think liberals do bad things; liberals think conservatives are bad people.”
This observation has been made for decades, and it’s been generally true in my experience. Liberals are much more likely to simply dismiss anything a conservative has to say on the grounds that the conservative is stupid, racist, elitist, uncaring, or under the influence of other pernicious forces like big business. The common self-aggrandizing statement by liberals that they belong to the ‘reality based community’ is another way of saying that conservatives are ignorant hicks. Hell, they probably cling bitterly to guns and religion to escape their essential failures as humans.
Conservatives thought Jimmy Carter was a nice man with a whole lot of bad policies.
Liberals thought Reagan was evil. They thought George W. Bush was evil. They thought John McCain was a nice guy while he was a thorn in Bush’s side. As soon as he ran for President, they discovered that he was actually evil.
If you want to see the difference in the varying levels of intolerance and hatred between the left and right, I suggest you simply watch the footage of any right-wing rally, march, or demonstration, and compare it to footage of any left-wing march, rally, or demonstration. Hint: You won’t see a lot of screaming, enraged people throwing rocks at police during a Tea Party rally. Nor are you likely to see anything being burned in effigy by a guy in a Tricorner hat.
But by all means, I think you should ramp up the vitriol on the far left. Really get in people’s faces. Because Lord knows, your real problem isn’t that your politics are disliked by most Americans, it’s that you’re just not getting your message out. That fierce moral urgency of change just isn’t there any more, is it? Despite having most of the media and Hollywood at your back, you just can’t seem to get through to people just how correct you are about everything. So maybe you just need to bludgeon them a bit. Pound your message into their silly heads by holding demonstrations outside the homes of private citizens, staging sit-ins and blockading evil companies, shutting down phone lines of talk radio shows with mass call-in campaigns, and the like. Really get in people’s faces. In the words of the non-violent president Obama, punch back twice as hard. That ought to lead to electoral success.
Or, it could cause the rest of the moderates to flee your cause, and reveal the far left for what they are: Less than 20% of the American population. Actually, self-described ‘liberals’ are less than 20% of the population, but a lot of them are likely not particularly strident. You might even lose some of them with your new activism, and give the right an endless supply of talking points to fight you with.
Dude, be careful throwing around the b-word like that. Don’t you know that’s an insult to conservatives like Starving Artist?
It shouldn’t.
Particularly if they’d once said those things…
Not really. Since the old thug was so good at swimming, and then taking a long hike homewards whilst a women was drowning in his car, my only regret is that he never took a long hike over a short bridge.
Sadly, I could never tell the difference between Mr. Morrison and Frankie Laine…
Well, I should suspect that virtually no right-wingers believe that now. Not even the terminally stupid ones. Not even the dead-eyed robots. Not even the dear departed neo-cons. Still, it served their turn…
Oh, there’s still a Doper or two who haven’t caught on yet.
And we don’t need vitriol, nobody does. Stridency, though, would help us quite a bit.
This is just hand waving. I threw together a quick list of terms that were specific accusations against the Left. You have thrown together a list of negative terms, most of them general, and claimed that they were used against the Right. So, go back and read Gingrich’s own much longer list–the specific call by the leader of the party to employ against opponents. (And that is not even considering nonsense such as “death panels” that the Republican leadership has admitted was dishonest and wrong, but which continues to be used by various speakers on the Right.) Hateful words have been directed toward both sides over and over again.
I have never claimed that the Left was all that peaceful until “provoked.” I simply find your absurd claim that the Right only responded to aggravation from the Left to be utterly lacking in factual content.
Note your actual phrase that I requoted:
If you really believe that blacklisting people and ruining other careers through innuendo and smears was polite discourse, then you probably should not comment until you have actually studied your history. As to day-to-day invective over the last 45 years, the only times in my life I have found myself in the company of a majority of the Left was in college–and then it was not unanimous by any measure. My entire life since then I have generally found myself in the company of far more people on the Right of the political spectrum. I certainly remember the invective the Lefties with whom I went to school spewed, but it had nothing on the anti-Left stuff to which I have listened throughout a career in a couple of dozen work environments and a half dozen neighborhoods over the last decades. I am sure that the folks on the Left are still expressing their anger in less then genteel ways, (as displayed on this message board), but any claims that the Left is more harsh or less civil that the Right are simply wrong.
In one area, however, there is a difference. Only the most far out Leftists ever muttered about putting people up against the wall or offing the pigs. Only the tiny number of people on the extreme wing of the Left have considered that acceptable behavior. Contrast this to the Right where a sitting U.S. senator could make veiled threats that a president should be wary of visiting his own troops lest they kill him or where Representative Giffords’s opponent in the last election could hold a political rally in which he called on voters to “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16. . . .”* Most folks on the Right, (outside the religious zealots), eschew such imagery, but it is more common on the Right than the Left.
- I do not think that this event actually affected Loughner; I think it is just a really ironic coincidence. However, associating the removal of a person from office with the firing of a weapon is rather more likely to be an event sponsored by the Right than the Left.
Which differs in no way from the reverse process in which a speaker on the Left will be dismissed or ignored because he or she is too stupid to understand economics, too cowardly to want to defend his or her nation, too lazy to try to make it in the real world without government protection, too indebted to unions to support business, too befuddled by doubletalk by college professors (who can’t possibly know anything about the real world) to understand common sense, and/or too immoral to defend “real” values such as marriage.
Well, yeah, but the guy saying that to the liberal would be right…
(I just couldn’t resist, having heard the genuine puzzlement in certain lefties on this board when they said something just like this in reverse ;))
-XT