Sam, I’ve seen your analysis on Libertarian politics. How is it that someone so smart so completely fails to understand any of these issues? Seriously, I’m rather stunned. This is the sort of list that you’d think ought to include “you didn’t build that”.
Nonsense. Let’s have some citations, please.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
See, this is what I’m talking about. When people here on the left bring up ridiculous right-wing talking points, they’re taking them directly from the agendas and speeches of major political players. From the planks of the republican platforms. From the bloviations of Limbaugh or the biography of Carson. Which figures on the other side of the aisle are you getting this from? Who is saying that capitalism is dead, or needs to be replaced? Please, let’s have a source! Is it Obama? Hillary? Sanders? Kerry? Maddow? Moore? Who in the world is saying such crazy things (and isn’t just doing it for the clickbait)? Let’s hear it, so we can remove them from positions of authority! They sound like real nuts!
But that’s just it - they aren’t in positions of authority, are they? They’re random HuffPo columnists, or university professors; people with no influence or power, saying these things within a very specific context or as an overblown reaction to injustice which they then go on to qualify. Fringe loons like this have no place in the upper echelons of the democratic party. They ARE the upper echelons of the republican party.
And this is just nonsensical. So wait, lemme get this straight - Nordic Democracy, the system that has made the Nordics (and to a lesser extent France and Germany) some of the best places in the world to live, is somehow “recycled from the ash heap of history”? No, I’m sorry, these ideas are not somehow “discarded”. They’re active, right now, and they work. Sanders isn’t recycling ideas from the garbage. He’s stealing ideas from places where we know they’ve worked! You want recycling from the garbage? Carson is a Young Earth Creationist!
Meanwhile, does Sanders deny evolution? Does he deny global warming? Does he think that Obama is a Muslim? Does he think America should close its doors to all Muslim immigrants? Does he think that the pyramids were grain silos built by Joseph? Does he show a complete disregard for factual reality and fact-checking? These are the sort of things we bring up when we say that Carson and Trump are crazy. What comparable ideas does Sanders hold? Other than the idea that you can call yourself “Socialist” and still be politically electable, regardless of how good your platform is, but that’s more a reflection of how crazy America as a whole is than anything else.
Now can we PLEASE stop saying “Democrats think X” without a source to back it up? Please? It’s getting ridiculous.
[Quote=John Mace]
Identity politics is a winning strategy, and I think the Republicans are learning about that.
[/quote]
I agree with most all of your takedown of Sam Stone’s surprisingly vacuous post. However, the Republicans mastered identity politics more than a half century ago. The Southern Strategy, the Moral Majority, anti-gay politics… They aren’t “learning,” they’ve been holding master classes on the subject.
They fulfill defence obligations just fine. That they don’t fulfill the quotas intended to serve the imperial ambitions of one member of NATO doesn’t negate that. They just make sane, rational choices to provide more teachers, healthcare, etc.
I can’t even begin to fathom what you’re trying to conflate with the last sentence.
As it is beginning to be more the case your political compass is so faulty that you fail to see what is going on.
The case you are referring about a democrat suggesting that climate change deniers should be punished is itself a propaganda point of the right, in reality that democrat politician was going after the ones funding denial and wanted to ask the denier scientists about their funding, not to preventing them from talking. His approach though was quickly criticized and he pulled off.
That is not what Lamar Smith and the Republicans in congress are doing, he did double and tripled down up to the point of directly accusing the scientists of malfeasance.
That is indeed crazy behaviour after the evidence was presented (and confirmed elsewhere) regarding the latest studies that show that the so called pause in global warming was not there. And Republicans are not condemning that abuse of power from the congress critters.
…
This is silly in light of one noticing that Obama is actually a centrist and the health care system he came with was a Republican idea.
Nonsense when you also noticed that indeed gay marriage and pot legalization are becoming mainstream. And worldwide developed nations see universal health care as mainstream.
As noticed, your political compass is broken, when 600 scientists advised NOAA to stand up to the craziness of the Republican party NOAA and the democrats listened, the Republicans are listening to the Lysenkoes of today, that is indeed madness.
When the internet was starting, I thought it would be THE force in preventing tyranny. No one could suppress information any longer. People couldn’t be kept in the dark, denied the truth.
But instead it seems to have created the situation where people only hear data that confirms what they already believe. Instead of meeting new people and hearing new ideas, everyone seems to only care about hearing confirming information. Instead of becoming a society of open ideas and debate, we’ve become more Balkanized than the Balkans ever were.
Instead of being forcibly kept in ignorance by the Government, people are willingly doing it to themselves. And they think it’s a good thing!
[Quote=Sam Stone]
They have lost in court on gun control repeatedly, but keep coming back to it.
[/quote]
This is a particularly bizarre criticism to launch today, when the headlines on many news sources include:
“Supreme Court Leaves Assault Weapons Ban Intact”
and
“Supreme Court Won’t Hear Challenge to Assault Weapons Ban in Chicago Suburb”
Yeah, pretty stupid to go to the courts regarding gun control.
I think it’s the cumulative effect of talk radio and bubble world media where you can now have much better silos of information and confirming beliefs than used to be possible in the conservative world.
I was talking to an older lady, and she mentioned in passing that obamacare was causing the hospital she worked at to lose money (totally possible with some of the changes). The implication of course was that we never should have altered a thing, and she even parroted the line about the US having the best healthcare system in the world. I point out that may be partially true for the people that have it, but we fail to cover tens of millions and our system is far more expensive than other nations like Canada.
At this point she goes into the talking points about Canadians having massive wait times where they are forced to migrate to the US to get certain treatments. And not wanting to have to pay for people that can’t afford healthcare.
I did not press the point further due to timing, but she heard that notion about Canadian healthcare from places like talk radio or fox news. Had she talked to Canadians who actually live under that system and asked if they would like to trade theirs for our US system that was supposedly the greatest in the world, she would have been repeatedly rebuffed. Even if there was some increased wait for specific procedures, the benefits gained in actual results and cost savings would dwarf any of our advantages. Does not matter, a bubble world allows bad ideas to go unchallenged, and the same goes for incredibly imperfect mediums like talk radio or television shows with hard commercial breaks and the hosts prerogative on who is invited on and what is covered.
My clearest example of this is Avik Roy. Hearing him on talk radio vs his dialog with Ezra Klein while the latter was at the Washington Post was night and day. On talk radio he sounded like Healthare reforms that we implemented were the worst of all possible worlds (and god knows it’s got problems), but in his online video dialog he came across as MUCH more reasonable and nuanced and even supportive of exchanges.
BTW, I think you have an opposite effect in American universities with speech codes and the left ramping up on their authoritarian streak to silence critical ideas. This is not good. I never understood people wanting to shut off debates or silence ideas. If there is an idea that I disagreed with, I always wanted it out in the open and challenged in the most public and visible way, and shown to be in err or faulty in some respect.
To that end, I NEVER wanted the ideas I disagreed with championed by fools, I wanted (and still want) them championed by the smartest people around so that the best possible foot forward could be placed. What is the point of winning a race against a cripple? Big deal, who cares if you can out argue Sean Hannity (he’s a moron), Krauthammer would be a much better target.
From afar the thing that really strikes me is the lack of proper journalism, I don’t mean just newspaper journalism but across news media. I’d imagine especially digital media.
Journalists ask questions, they probe the position espoused by a party, a vested interest group of individual. That’s certainly the case in Europe. People and arguments have to be scrutinised or they have zero credibility.
If you have a right-wing capitalist-owned news media that chooses not to ask probing questions but effectively allows commentators to parrot slogans, you’re going to end up with what you have now in the US.
I’ve watched perfectly mainstream terrestrial news broadcasts open-mouthed at statements made by newsreaders as if they were facts. In comparison with other media it might seen reasonable but it’s stuff no one would even want to try and get on the air in the UK - yet unquestioned, accepted as fact.
I don’t know what happened to responsible journalism but unless you read a broadsheet newspaper … I don’t know what you can do in the US. It’s like the sane people already lost.
Getting back to the original question, I suspect the GOP started down the crazy trail in 1980, when Reagan started courting evangelicals, such as Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. The evangelical Christianization of conservative politics has subtly eroded a valuable political ideal that we inherited from the British: the Queen’s Loyal Opposition. That is, the notion that the party across the aisle is misguided and even moronic, but has the same essential aim as yours’; the health and betterment of the nation.
Evangelicals, though, don’t argue with wrong-headed but good-hearted opponents; no, they battle Evil. There’s no compromise with Satan. So no accommodation of his nefarious minions on the left.
That’s what I see in the Republican Party - parts of it, anyway - the sense that those who oppose them, or even just different from them, aren’t simply wrong but in fact depraved.
And since it’s easy to hate someone who hates you, this has spread to the other side, as well. I’m as guilty of demonizing rightists as Fox News is of liberals, often as not.
From an outsiders viewpoint, it seems to be a consequence of the strategy the Republicans chose to deal with their shrinking demographic base.
Rather than reach out to a wider demographic, they appear to have gone for a strategy of increasing the turnout from their shrinking base. Get a greater and greater fraction of the aging white demographic out of the sofa and into the voting booth.
That does not seem like a terrible idea on the face of it, but over-reliance appears to have painted themselves into a corner. Basically, to get more and more voters out, they have kept turning up the rhetoric until its pretty apocalyptic. And said rhetoric have, along with trying to refight the social battles of the bases youth, pushed away likely demographics and voters. They can’t climb down now, because the people who don’t factcheck and believe the stories about European healthcare are majority of the base they got left.
Its a study in evolution and over specialization really.
Some influential evangelical, can’t remember who, might have been Falwell, once described what drew them to politics. It was Roe v. Wade. I think that had such an influence on religious types that they felt they could not sit out of politics any longer, and started afterwards to leverage their religious power into political ones. I don’t know how correct that is, so take it with a grain of salt.
Everyone took the good answers. I’ll blame the atomization of society. People want fellowship and an identity to cling to in a nihilistic culture. Religion, social politics, anything to give their lives meaning. Some of the angriest people are fairly well off. As long as they fight their lives have meaning.
You know you’re a real conservative when you support mercantilism.
Just kidding. I think.
Opinions like yours, which aren’t difficult to find, lay bare the simplistic left-right stereotypes about the right supporting free trade and capitalism and the left being protectionists…or socialists…or whatever it’s supposed to be. Sometimes the workers are stubborn and don’t fall in line with their masters’ opinions. Blue collar workers don’t give a fig what some dead guy named Ricardo thinks is best for them.
Isn’t that a tautology? Or did you have a comparison to other countries in mind? How does it even work, when the supposed center is always changing? Shades of the golden mean fallacy espoused by beltway journalists.
To answer the original question, I’ll add to the count of those who think it was the Reagan era. Saint Ron assured his disciples that they were the people who mattered, the people who wanted America stronger than its evil enemies, who went to church and obeyed authority, who didn’t use drugs or have homosexual intercourse.
But the people on the margins didn’t go away. More and more people joined their quest for full and equal rights and the Disciples weren’t special nor in power any more. Mass insanity ensued.
The seeds were sown earlier, but the Republican Party didn’t start coming unhinged until Clinton was elected. That’s when the ridiculous conspiracy theories started moving into the mainstream (Vince Foster’s “murder”, for example) and the brinkmanship and witch hunts began – shutting down the government, investigations as endless fishing expeditions.
That was incoherent. Ukraine and Georgia (not the Southern state) would have liked to have NATO protection. I suppose current events don’t matter? And don’t you think being a parasite to American military protection is unbecoming a prosperous modern nation that has committed to a certain level of defense spending? I’m sure they’ll call on their obligations they can’t be bothered to pay for.
