Starting from scratch, i’ll say it’s even odds on the people who’ve not grown soft and dependent on machines to do the job in question, yes.
And again you’re assuming “never done those things for their day job” = “never done those things at all” - i’m a scientist-turned-software-developer, so I’m firmly in the “not farmer/logger” side of your false dichotomy, but I bet I’ve done more things by hand than the typical American farmer - and yes, that includes knapping flint tools, weaving cloth, smelting iron, hand-planing boards, skinning a buck nd tanning that skin with its own brain, etc…
From scratch, with no resources, except maybe the clothes on their back? I’d be surprised if any made it to the first winter, let alone through it. Their ideologies are no more relevant than their hair color.
Hurricane Ditka reasonably points out that farmers and hunters tend to lean conservative. Mr. Dibble and others counter that modern hunters and farmers are technology dependent, and point out that liberals have more scientists and also that there are live off the land hippies among the left.
I think everyone is wildly underestimating how dire the situation would be. You raise chickens? Great! But there aren’t any chickens. You can grow corn? Great! Where are you getting the seeds from? Can you make a stone axe or a flint knife? Can you make an atlatl and use it to kill a deer, which you will gut and skin with your flint knife and cook over the fire you made yourself?
Even if enough people survive to create a primitive society based on farming and hunting, the concepts of liberalism or conservatism will have long been forgotten. Maybe some distorted terms will survive in the unifying tribal myths. The society will be a group of tribes, hopefully getting along. Maybe there will be a central capital, with a Czar or Pharaoh. His name will be a rumor to the tribes in the hinterlands. The one advantage they might have a shared myth-memory of their origin, and possibly enough remnants of scientific and historical knowledge from old earth that they might avoid war and other mistakes.
But probably they will all die in the first year.
Maybe this guy will be in your group. He might help.
ETA: Missed Mr. Dibble’s post immediately above. Sadly he is not American and would not be available to help.
Everyone keeps saying this and honestly it’s got to be the silliest, silliest thing I’ve ever read.
I know rural counties tend to vote Republican but they aren’t ONE HUNDRED PERCENT Republican. There are many, many farmers among Democratic voters. Far more farmers than you’d need. Of the tens of millions of people who vote Democratic I am one hundred percent confident there are more than enough farmers to get the farms up and running and the chickens fed.
The idea people have here that any one professional is limited to “conservatives” or “liberals” is, to be perfectly frank, stupid.
A big part of this scenario depends on conditions that were never really specified in the OP. Is everyone going to some other alternate universe where a planet just like Earth exists, just that it’s been depopoulated, and all traces of humankind have been removed? Or are there whole cities empty of people, just waiting to be occupied? Is everyone getting dropped off ‘Naked and Afraid’ style, with nothing? Do they get the clothes on their backs? Do the preppers get a chance to bring their go-bags with them? Hand tools? Can AR15.com bring their ammo forts with them? Are they going to land in southern California, or Minnesota in the middle of winter?
Right. If it’s really the Naked and Afraid scenario (which seemed to be the consensus view of the OP’s question) then the choice of political views as the dividing criterion is pretty much irrelevant. May as well use brown eyes vs blue eyes or American League vs National League. Which makes the whole thing pretty silly IMHO.
A much more interesting version would be two separate Earths: one where all the Conservatives get “raptured” out of the USA while all else remains the same and another one where all the Liberals are eliminated in the same way.
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Without conservative pockets to pick to fund liberal entitlement programs the liberal world would soon fall into chaos and rioting.
The PTBs will have seen this coming and jacked the tax rates up into the 75-90% stratosphere (for everyone but themselves) at which point many of the actual wage earners will discover they are actually conservatives and kick start the republican party, though they will of course call it something else.
I’ll submit Chicago and Detroit as prime examples of decades of liberal (mis)leadership.
The latest news are that Detroit has actually seen a surplus, of course under constant review and auditing.
As for Chicago, the article cited does mention that Chicago has a 426 million deficit, but Detroit was several Billion dollars in the hole. And a lot has to do with the loss of the industrial sector and the loss of a lot of suburban housing.
As for Passing the buck: the article cited mentions that the Mayor is increasing taxes, do you have a cite that shows that those taxes will not affect the liberals too?
Oh, sue me. I was trying to find a way, ANY way not to say “republicans suck and are inferior in any way”.
On another subject, regarding the idea that democrats would bankrupt society by trying to provide social services - they might! Or an alternative prediction would be that given a sufficient GDP society can actually afford to support its citizens, and doesn’t have to act like a vampire sucking them dry for the benefit of the few and throwing the drained corpses aside. Presuming a sufficient GDP of course - if everyone is dropped in Alaska in their skivvies, it might take society a bit of time to build to the point of being able to support itself.
Short term, the conservatives are better off, because they’d get more of the farmers – and if there’s one job civilization absolutely can’t do without, it’s food production.
Long term, the liberals are better off because the conservatives will have warmed the planet to the point where farming is no longer possible.
Conservatives provide social order. Liberals largely live under the order built over centuries of maintaining cultural norms. Of course liberals have chipped away at this order, at first in constructive and important ways, then they jumbled their program. Today the modern American liberal program is largely incoherent, and they do not understand the importance of social order.
Both worlds would be dystopian. I do believe that the conservatives would last longer, though.
A lot of these people you mention could be conservative because they few a part of that group, but if you ask them specific questions on policy without politics, they trend more centerist. The left bubble does as wel from my experience. My mom is a registered republican who thinks the best president we ever had was Jimmy Carter. Hated Regan.
I guess what I’m saying is the labels are pretty meaningless.
This made me chortle - you’re almost as partisan as I am!
I honestly tried to think of a way that conservatives provide social order, and the closest I got was “slavery is a social order”. What conservatives actually do is try to minimize social structure - they wish to reduce governmental oversight, power, and authority, with the aim of increasing individual liberty. Taken to the extreme, of course, unlimited personal liberty is anarchy, which leads to rule by the strong/well armed, which leads to feudalism. The rebuttal of course is that conservatives know better than to take it to the extreme - but that’s not what we’re seeing in America right now. Conservatives here want utter deregulation of business, minimal or nonexistent taxes, minimal restraint on behavior and treatment of others, and minimal or nonexistent societal support programs. The things they do want are a strong state church bordering on a theocracy, and a strong leadership that does little more than fund police and military force to enforce order and wage war, defensive or otherwise. Maybe a road service and a fire department if they’re feeling frisky. So yeah - feudalism would satisfy them just fine.
(Well, the extreme ones anyway. But I don’t get the impression that the thread is going for “the moderates on either side would dominate and the topias would be largely the same”-type answers.)
On the upside, feudalism is a perfectly functional societal format, and once they got their mechanical base back up, they could be a really damned efficient feudal society, with industrial machinery and farm equipment making millions of serfs irrelevant - and therefore, unpaid and unfed. I tip my hat here to the conservative notion that charity is still good as long as it’s voluntary, and the strong church presence would provide a certain amount of active societal support, so long as the recipients weren’t one of the eighty varieties of unsalvageable sinner. But the sheer number of unemployed people (due to industrial efficiency) would quite certainly far outstrip the ability for church and charity to care for them. And thus you’d have revolting peasants. But given that large standing army, everything will probably be fine, in the end, for the people still standing.
There have been tons of what-if threads about having to restart civilization from scratch. The most well-supported conclusion is always : mostly everybody starve to death.
Someone mentioned having medicine in two years. It’s not that we wouldn’t have medicine in 2 years. It’s that we wouldn’t have agriculture in 20 years. So, as to which group would fare better : in my opinion, the best hunters, the most likely to resort quickly to cannibalism, the most ruthless and willing to cull out less useful people. And values would change extremely quickly. You don’t follow your political principles when your children don’t have anything to eat.
The question asked would be more meaningful if we assume that the other side just vanish, and the existing infrastructure is retained.
This made me chortle - you’re almost as partisan as I am!
I honestly tried to think of a way that conservatives provide social order, and the closest I got was “slavery is a social order”.
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When I say social order, I am talking about the fabric of connections between individuals that make it possible for people to contract with each other and more or less get along. Chattel slavery was a tenuous social order once good liberals recognized it was immoral and also not good for business. In any case, respect for property rights is now one important component of the social order. It is possible only in a somewhat conservative culture. Modern liberals are constantly shifting and demanding a change for equality or other nonsense. This makes the social order tenuous in a bad way. One day you are a successful producer of goods, the next your factory is overrun by a leftist mob or shut down by the government because of the spotted tortoise.
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What conservatives actually do is try to minimize social structure- they wish to reduce governmental oversight, power, and authority, with the aim of increasing individual liberty.
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No, that is a libertarian impulse that sometimes finds a home on the right but not always and not exclusively.
In the same way that conservatives allegedly want personal liberty(I don’t see how this claim squares with your later claim that they want a theocracy), liberals want personal freedom. They want people to not be bound by earthly constraints like scarcity and human nature. People shouldn’t have to work and they should be free from social judgement.
It’s hard for me to explain in what way I’m a conservative, but I’m definitely not one who gets down with any of that. You must admit that would make for one hell of a social order though, which was my original claim.
(Well, the extreme ones anyway. But I don’t get the impression that the thread is going for “the moderates on either side would dominate and the topias would be largely the same”-type answers.)
History shows that efficiency and increased productivity do not put people out of work, but put them into other lines of work. See the huge reduction of farm and then factory workers and still relatively low unemployment.
