Saw that this had been asked on Reddit and thought this might be interesting for the SDMB. I’ll start.
I’m a Lefty and some of my most right views are:
We have a right to own guns. (We do need some controls and reforms though)
Defund the Police is over the top. Yes changes are needed but defund? Come on man.
We need a strong military (but let’s be smarter and more accountable on how we spend those $)
Some kind of identification is a reasonable thing to ask for in order to vote. ( but F restricting food, water, F closing earlier, F reducing # polling places, etc., etc., etc)
I’m a moderate liberal. I used to be to the right of the Democrats, and even some Republicans, in that I wanted whatever immigration laws we chose to have rigorously enforced. The Democrats have never literally believed in open borders, but both parties gave illegal immigration a sort of benign neglect. The Obama came and started actually enforcing the laws as a Democrat (and/or replaced the previous administrations ad hoc policies with a more formal process). So now I am no longer to the right of the center of the Democratic Party.
On the leftist side, I am clear-headed enough to realize that we need massive across-the-board revenue increases to solve the debt crisis. That means a wealth tax and an increase in rates from the middle of the middle class on up. 20 years ago the rates I want would have seemed pretty reasonable but now they’d be instant red baiting material, and the wealth tax is justifiable because it would make up for the ultra-low rates the wealthy have been enjoying for the past 20 years.
I support a Norwegian-style criminal justice system (i.e., nobody gets prison longer than 20 years, unless additional time needs to be tacked on because the offender is still dangerous - strong focus on rehabilitation, not punishment).
I also think private gun ownership has gone way, way nuts in America. It disturbs me particularly that many gun supporters these days think that having a Parkland, Columbine or Sandy Hook happen every now and then is a perfectly acceptable price to pay for gun rights.
I don’t see any of the OP’s examples as right wing views. I’m on the left side of the political spectrum, and I would agree with those, as would the vast majority of those on the left.
OTOH, many on the right have a caricature of those on the left who would disagree.
My most right view would be on nuclear power, as I am all for it.
I’m also in more agreement with the right than the left when it comes to employment laws. I’ll go for a higher MW, but there seem to be a number of other asks coming from the left that would make many businesses no longer viable.
I agree with most of what you said in the OP there, the only nit is the part about voter ID, the ID is not the problem, the problem has been that in many of the states where they claim to be concerned about it, the right-wingers also make it difficult for the poor and minorities to get those.
Lefty here. I want to get rid of birthright citizenship. This is a frontier country concept, and we’re not a frontier country anymore.
I’m also pro nuclear power.
I’m anti-rent control. I’m also sort of anti-housing-zoning-law, I’d prefer a laissez faire build whatever apartment building or house you want wherever you want, whenever you want system. Granted, it’s probably best to keep industrial and commercial in specific zones, but residential/mixed use should be open game.
Ex-Libertarian with a few leftist leanings… but this place turned me into a Leftist with a few Right Wing holdout views.
But now? The Right has moved so far right that those views have suddenly become Centrist.
But my ‘rightest’ one? I hate abortions.
So yeah, I won’t have one… and you have the final say on what you do with/to your body. I just wish that had started with smarter decisions early on.
AND I wish the Dems could publicize that with contraception availability and sex education, there’ll be fewer abortions with Democrats governing.
I’ll join a lot of others in that I feel the demands of the extreme portion of each political spectrum have become the talking points that seem to attempt to define each party. I’m a social liberal, fiscal conservative who believes.
Gun ownership is a constitutional right, and simultaneously become a problem in many ways. So we either need to amend the Constitution (don’t try to work around it), or we need to involve non-politicians, including security, police, and civilian experts to help with some common sense FEDERAL laws rather than a hodgepodge of state laws.
The police are, by this point, a hopelessly corrupt, self serving group that have put themselves in the position of being almost totally self-governed. Not good. They need to be rebuilt from the ground up, with tight control on whether current members can be a part of what replaces them. But we will always need some degree of policing, possibly with violence, so saying it can all be replaced with hugs and love is equally foolish
Nuclear power is a big hell yeah from me. Yes, it has terrible TERRIBLE long term consequences, but if we don’t face our current power issues, it is going to be one ERCOT after another. And since we don’t want to talk about it, we have a hard time making the best of an existing technology and in the meantime stumble around still using a metric ton of non-renewable resources while hoping for a magic fix.
Leftish here.
I am pro-gun as much as I am pro-right tool for the job, and pro-proper training to use that tool.
I am pro-police, as long as they are trained to do the job they are asked to do, and not just taking the jobs away from those who are specifically trained for those jobs. I guess this falls under “right tool for the job.”
I am pro nuclear power, with proper precautions, tight regulations, and plans for waste disposal.
I consider myself liberal, but disagree on some of the approaches the left has WRT law enforcement. IMHO we’re too harsh on victimless crimes, and need to drastically reduce or even eliminate criminal penalties for things like drug possession, use, and sale, prostitution, gambling, and those sorts of things. The default option for drug offenses should be to focus on rehab, counseling, and psychiatric care. Same thing for “crimes” like being homeless, loitering, panhandling, etc.
On the other hand, and this is where I disagree with others on the left, I believe we should be a lot harder on violent criminals. There should be long prison terms of several decades for crimes like armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault, rape, and attempted murder. For white collar crimes (running Ponzi schemes like Bernie Madoff, large scale tax evasion, insider trading, bribing government officials, etc.) there should be some prison time, but there needs to be much heavier financial penalties. Confiscate ALL their ill gotten gains and use the funds to reimburse the victims or the federal / state / city treasury depending on who they cheated.
I’m about as far left as you can get. And, surprisingly, I share some right-wing goals. But, maybe unsurprisingly, my methods would differ.
For example: I favor fiscal responsibility. But, to me, that means not wasting money on things like the military and police, business subsidies, and immigration enforcement.
I also would love to see an end to abortion. But not by telling a woman that she can’t decide for herself. We should be able to greatly minimize the number of abortions by making it obsolete. By making sex education, and birth control a priority. By making it financially feasible to keep and raise a child if one chooses. By creating and maintaining a working system of adoption. By making the safety of women a priority: rape and incest are not ok ever. There’s much more, but you get the idea.
I hate to call myself a left-winger, I was a moderate until the right went over the cliff. But they did, and I’m solidly on the left of the divide.
So the legacy of that is that, contra my lefty position:
I’m not a gun nut and I dislike people who are. But having been trained in the military, I am comfortable with guns and am mostly neutral regarding gun laws. I neither support nor oppose any changes to gun law, unless it reduces duplication or conflict or vagueness. Considering the total cost to society, I feel like it’s more useful to spend that political capital on universal healthcare or UBI or statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, rather than gun control measures that are basically too late to have any effect.
Free markets are good. As long as we understand that markets are our servant, not our master, they are a great tool for figuring out what society actually needs, and getting the people who need it to pay for it. This is a much better approach than a bunch of interest-conflicted politicians getting a lobbyist to write legislation for whatever solution their corporate donors want to get paid to solve.
Nobody would consider me a winger in either direction. Where I tend to be conservative is in economics and the military. I’m very much against rent control and a lot of regulations.
My most left-wing opinion might be my support of LBGT+. I’m pretty much in favor of all of that. I’m a strong environmentalist as well (but pro nuke as some of you are probably tired of me saying).
I agree. The problem is that people on the right only pretend they want a free market, because historically that has tended to benefit the wealthy. What they really want is a heads the rich win and tails the poor lose system. The plutocrat class has been forced by circumstances to reveal their true colors.
They don’t like the free market if it means they have to raise wages to hire enough people to work in the chicken slaughterhouses, to wait tables, or to drive trucks. They don’t like the free market if it means that people freely choose to boycott businesses owned by bigoted owners. They cry out for government subsidies when the price of oil gets too low during the middle of a pandemic, and then tell the public to go suck a lemon when prices skyrocket as the pandemic restrictions ease and travel demand goes up. Saying they care about the free market is just another tool in their bag of tricks to fool the rubes. They don’t actually mean it.
I’m not particularly conservative, though by the standards of this message board, I apparently should get fitted for a pair of jackboots.
But:
I believe we should legalize all drugs.
Oh, not for any reason lefties would approve. I am a darwinist, and I think we should let natural selection take its course. Those who practice self-discipline would live. Those who practice self-indulgence would die. After they buried a lot of their elders and a few of their friends, the next generation of teenagers would grow up, sadder but wiser.
I believe that a woman should have the power to abort her child, for any reason she deems appropriate, up to and including the ninth month.
Notice the semantics.
I did not say “right”. I said “power”.
I did not say “pregnancy”. I said “child”.
I am not cowering behind euphemisms.
Freedom is not for the squeamish. It is for those who understand the consequences of their choices.
Here’s a British contribution. It’s one that may sound strange.
I’m a little bit left of center (by British standards, so arguably left wing by general US standards and modestly of the left by board standards.)
One of the founding principles of the NHS is that it should be free at the point of delivery. With certain exemptions* I think this should end. A fee should be payable for all NHS services - exams, treatments, operations, everything. It doesn’t have to be at all a big fee, but it has to be… noticeable. The reason is simple practicality - there’s too much of a temptation to treat something that’s free with contempt, or at least in too free and easy a manner. One example: there are too many missed appointments, each of which costs the NHS money; if each missed appointment costs you money, fewer will be missed.
Plus, investment equals buy-in; paying money towards healthcare makes you buy into taking care of yourself.
j
* - like destitution, or chronic extreme illness etc. And don’t ask a car crash victim for their credit card…
Oh, and just in case, NHS = National Health Service (as we’ve had a lot about unexplained acronyms recently).
I’m way left, but I’ve come around to support the death penalty. I’m totally aware of how it has been abused in the past but literally everything about our justice system has been abused since the beginning and I still want a justice system.
Putting people in prison for life just makes prisons dangerous for the staff and other prisoners. The costs as people age out and health care becomes more expensive are horrendous. Prisons in and of themselves are foul pits. And some criminals who are unquestionably guilty have no place in our society, even in prison.
I’m also an absolute originalist when it comes to guns. Every white man can have a muzzle-loader and/or flintlock pistol so that they can become part of a state militia if the British invade.
Right, my personal aphorism is that liberals use the free market to solve problems, and conservatives use the free market to forget about problems, and the compromise position is to write huge checks to solve the problem of corporations wanting more money.