Europeans generally have a negative opinion of George W. Bush, thanks to the war and global economic struggles. That has probably bled over to their opinion of Republicans in general. It wasn’t always like that. Ronald Reagan was pretty well liked in Europe.
Politics has become contentious and there are a lot of liberals in Hollywood and on college campuses. Not really sure how to respond without more specifics from the OP.
Which is it? Do you want people to be paid ‘according to the value of their skills’, even when those skills are in demand but TPTB decide they’re not worth paying for? OR do you want to do away with social safety nets? Or should the poor just be euthanised?
If you work full-time and still have to be on public assistance to survive, then your employer is the one receiving welfare.
The Republicans really have seemed to hold party over country in the area of Obamacare. While I understand that there could be legitimate opposition to the law, now that it is clear that the law is a done deal and that it isn’t going to be repealed any time soon the honorable thing to do would be to try to what you can to reduce the damage of its implementation. Instead the Republicans seem hell bent on making sure that it causes as much harm as possible with the hope that it would make Obama look bad.
This includes such tactics as opposing Obama’s delay of the employee mandate, (one would think if you thought the law was bad legislation you would want it delayed as long as possible). Refusing to accept money to expand Medicaid. Fighting a supreme court case based on an obvious typo with the goal of eliminating necessary subsidies to low income citizens, etc.
If this isn’t evil I don’t know what is.
It’s long been part of liberal ideology to demonize their opponents. This is a tactic that goes back at least as far as Lenin (no, wait, the French Revolution) and serves to get people agitated and motivated to take whatever action liberal ideology of the time wants. For example in the early days of feminism, men were portrayed as out having a ball at work all day, earning money hand over fist and enjoying themselves while the women were little better than slaves, having to work all day around the house and then wait on their husbands hand and foot when they came home at night.
Every bit of this is nonsense but it served its purpose, which was to make men the bad guy intentionally being mean to women and getting women radicalized to do what the left wants.
Basically this is why conservatives are seen as the bad guys. It’s a deliberate tactic and it works because people are always willing to see themselves as victims being taken advantage of. And unfortunately there seems to be no end to the number of things the left wants to demonize the right over and these days they’re even beginning to demonize each other. It would be funny if it weren’t so tiresome.
Because Republicans represent conservatives and conservatives have been wrong on every single issue in the entire history of mankind. Usually not only wrong but evil.
I think you missed all the preceding posts in this thread. Specific reasons have been listed explaining why modern Republicans are seen as the bad guys. It has nothing to do with seeing ourselves as victims. I certainly do not see myself as a victim, but I do see Republicans as misguided, or worse.
Your recollections about the early days of feminism is a bit off too, in my opinion. But, there certainly would be value in questioning societal gender expectations about home and work responsibilities. As with any movement, some will go over the top with their rhetoric, but that’s a normal reaction as the pendulum swings back and forth. I doubt anyone thinks women (or African-Amerians, or gays) should be confined by the same social constraints as they were 50 or 60 years ago. So, I guess things work out fairly well over time.
Except for the last bit, this was traditionally more the Libertarian viewpoint than the mainstream Republican viewpoint. In the last 10-20 years, however, extremely wealthy Libertarians (the .01%) have put together a phenomenal ground game to disrupt the Liberal notion that the rich should actually pay taxes, that Medicare and other social safety nets are necessary, and that taking care of the environment is a good thing. These used to be things that both the right and the left could agree on at least to some extent, and in fact both the EPA and OSHA were signed into law by President Nixon. While the Libertarian free-market movement (think Ayn Rand) was a fringe wacko group decades ago, it is now pretty much running the country by proxy. God help us all when or if they ever control all three branches of government.
Responsibility and self reliance are much harder ways to live than petitioning for a handout?
Liberalism is a force for progress. Conservatism is an opposing force. A tension between the two is a good thing, in that it tends to prevent too much change too quickly. But an imbalance in either direction is almost always a negative. Currently what we have (and have had for quite a while) is a weighting towards conservatism which is directly attributable to Republicans doing every last possible thing they can to cause that imbalance, quite often through dirty tricks, including creating logjams, gerrymandering and other strategies to limit liberal voting power, pandering to fear, promoting division, and flat-out misrepresentation. Not that some of these things are unique to Republicans, but overall they’re more guilty of it than the liberal side, i.e. Democrats.
Conveniently forgotten that it was the truly inept Democratic Flint “leadership” that led to said overlords. Even currently Flint’s leadership is remarkable. http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/09/us/flint-mayor-water-crisis-lawsuit/index.html?sr=twCNN051016flint-mayor-water-crisis-lawsuit1217AMStoryLink&linkId=24306380
And the Huffington Post and the Guardian would do exactly the same thing in reverse.
Cite?
Pretty much. I’m a social conservative and religious fundamentalist and I see the Democrats as the bad guys.
When your views become policy, I see it as basically un-American. Everyone is of course free to be as socially conservative as they like- in fact, in many cases I recommend it. But to impose it on the entire nation as policy, why, that amounts to a freedom-destroying government intrusion.
Religious fundamentalism is even worse (as policy, mind). Separation of church and state is in the 1st Amendment for a reason- the founders thought it was rather important. Feel free to be as religiously fundamentalist as you like, but try to force it into public policy and I am going to get nasty with you.
I hope with all my heart that the distinctions I’ve laid out in this post will be understood as intended, though I suspect that is unlikely.
This is part of the Right’s problem- they are relentlessly arguing with strawmen. I believe it is a tactic for protecting the conservative mind from appraising the full range and complexity of points surrounding any complex issue like social safety nets. All they have to say is, “So, what you’re saying, you filthy liberal, is that we can all abandon responsibility and self-reliance in favor of handouts? How’s that gonna work?” Through these means the paucity of the conservative position is never revealed, because they never actually engage the debate in the first place.
Then there is the hypocrisy of conservative positions. They don’t want the government to give aid to groups that need it, but do want it to step in and impose a particular religion and worldview on the country. Doesn’t the latter amount to aid for those who don’t need it? “The general welfare” does not equal “proselytization through force of law”.
Republican leaning states are more dependent on federal aid than Democratic leaning states.
Strawmen? Perhaps. But given the quality of discussion which is mostly snark and derision from the left in this very thread I don’t see the obligation to not respond in kind. With regards to religion? I’m not religious. But I am conservative in the sense that I don’t like empowering the government beyond what it needs to function for its core duties. In that sense I’m probably a classical liberal. Not one of these statists that would turn the US into Venezuela so we could all be equally miserable but at least equal.
And yes, conservatives quite often do engage in the debate and are met with accusations of racism, sexism, hating the poor and other slanders. Why? Because the left likes to exploit the desire to feel virtuous in order to get votes from the naive with respect to human nature with regards to acquiring power. By demonizing the right as hateful in contrast the left can claim to “care!”
Here’s an example of how my particular strand of conservative thinking works. I hear about a policy of civil asset forfeiture in order to fight crime. What do you think I think?
A). Hooray get those vile drug traffickers
B). This is a very dangerous and corruption producing violation of civil liberties.
Is that simplistic? Perhaps. But anyone who has studied power and human nature should automatically choose B.
So? I know that is a favorite meme of the left but you do realize that red states and blue states are not homogeneous. Discounting Social Security and Medicare which people earn through work do you think those folks dependent on aid vote primarily democratic or republican?
Who cares? Those states have more money coming in from the federal govt. that go out in taxes.
The leanings are determined by which way the state voted in 2012.
So you’re saying that in Republican dominated states, the majority of those who receive aid are Democratic?
Got a cite?
That’s a good example of what I mean. Can you name anybody in US government or media promoting the idea that we should turn the country into Venezuela? If you want to argue against that, I guess you will look good in front of the uninformed, but it doesn’t address any genuine points of the discussion.