Hi, all.
As should be news to no one, polarization and animosity between conservatives and liberals is at one of its all-time highs in America right now. There’s even talk of a second civil war looming. Obviously, there are strong passions and convictions on both sides, and people on both sides have claimed that the other is a grave threat to the integrity of the nation itself. I’m familiar with the views and concerns of my own side: we view Donald Trump’s (and his allies’ and supporters’) statements and actions as being an attack on the democratic process that defines our nation, and are worried that the strategies and tactics he and they are employing will make future elections farcical, paving the way for an authoritarian state (a dictatorship). I am less familiar with why conservatives feel Democrats and liberals are a threat to the nation and its integrity in similar fashion. My best guess is that conservatives buy Trump’s assertions that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, and thus might have similar fears as liberals do, but I also get the sense conservatives have deeper, older concerns than this, and that Trump was/is viewed as a solution to them.
Can you please try to articulate here what those fears are? And, to any liberals reading this, please refrain from answering in conservatives’ stead. I’m interested in their opinions, not your opinions of their opinions.
I used to be a liberal too.
Right up until the evergreen college strangeness. I didn’t understand why those students were acting the way they were. So I started looking into it.
It’s a lot of very dense reading to actually understand how liberals and their values have changed. A lot of Derrida, Foucault, Marx, etc has crept into the liberal idea of society.
Conservatives value freedom and the individual. Liberals have begun to go backwards, treating people as part of social groups. So instead of you just being you, and having the ability to succeed or fail on your own merits (the things that we all used to agree on), have become twisted.
This is where the left really lost someone like me. I was having a conversation about people and individualism with a friend of mine and she said “have you ever heard of intersectionality?” Well, yes of course. But you intersect everyone enough and you’re just left with a perfectly unique human. Skin color, religion, education, preferences, you add them all up and no one is the same as anyone else.
So that’s a bit of the social ways that liberals are moving us away from a capitalist democracy. I’d suggest reading Stephen hicks “understanding postmodernism” to kind of start to see why conservatives don’t like the social direction liberals want to take the west.
And as far as policy, a lot of liberal solutions to problems is just to throw money at shit. And bloating government to make up more programs to throw money at.
The government is incompetent, and liberals want to keep giving government more control over peoples lives. But the government will never make better decisions for your life than you will.
That’s basically what taxes are. You find the government with your tax dollars, and they decided how to spend it. But that money is always going to be better spent by you directly. You’ll always make better financial decisions for yourself and your family than the government ever will.
And since the government isn’t an actual expert in any field, and are completely incompetent, they will actually make resoundingly terrible decisions with your money.
If you want to help people, give money yourself through charities of your choice, you don’t need to hand it to the government and hope they spend it in a way you would support. If you had that 30% in your pocket, you could spend it exactly how you feel is best to help people.
Obviously this is very high-level and not detailed, but a little overview, broad strokes.
The feeling of inevitable violence is because the leftists have decided that anyone who isn’t a leftist is a bigoted nazi. I mean, those are pretty obviously fighting words.
If you call someone a nazi, that’s extremely insulting and people will defend themselves. It’s dehumanizing. There are very few nazis or white supremacists in the world. But the left thinks there are 80 million of them in just the US alone
This is a lot more helpful than your other comment ITT, which I’m not going to bother responding to.
I remember that and I agree their behavior was balls-to-the-wall crazy and totally unjustified. Thing is, most liberals who saw that agreed the students were out of line. Just like most conservatives agree the 1/6 crowd were out-of-line. Don’t judge an entire half of the political spectrum by their extremists.
Liberals value freedom too, don’t be daft. No group would admit that they don’t value freedom, and virtually all do in some sense. Conservatives grip that liberals are encroaching on people’s religious freedoms, while liberals gripe that conservatives stand in the way of freedoms for gay people, women, racial minorities, etc.
As for individualism vs. collectivism, it’s not as simple as individualism=good, collectivism=bad. In any functional society, there is always a balance between the freedoms of the individual and and the needs of the group. Supporting one while neglecting the other always leads to societal problems. It’s not “backwards” to treat people as parts of social groups—we all are a part of social groups, even as we are distinct individuals as well.
I take issue with intersectionality too, but not for the reason you’ve given here. I think here you’re taking the idea to an extreme it was never meant to be taken to and thus judging it to be absurd when you’re the one who’s taken it to that absurd end. I don’t have a problem with intersectionality as a concept—it’s just the idea that people can be given a set of social “coordinates” in society by mapping where they fall on various bipolar axes. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a valid way of looking at subsections of society. The problem I have with it is that most people who talk about intersectionality and use it in political arguments don’t use it as a method of analysis but as a method of painting a literal crosshairs on certain demographics to make them the enemy.
I think I can comfortably speak for most moderate liberals when I say that we don’t want a communist state, wherein the government owns everything and there’s only one political party to vote for. However, that doesn’t mean that capitalism has no flaws that it can’t correct itself. I favor capitalism, regulated by some socialist policies—which, again, I think I can safely say is what most moderate liberals want. Lemmy apparently is a haven for far leftist commies though. Never seen so many of them in one “place,” to be honest.
I work in community mental health and service a lot of people on welfare, disability, etc. Having seen how the system works up close, I can certainly agree that there is a lot of wasteful spending and the system overall is very inefficient. However, private charitable organizations have simply failed to help the populations I work with, and in my personal experience, that’s partially because a lot of them genuinely don’t want to. Churches are often only interested in helping if there’s a chance to gain a new convert, and lots of local organizations that focus on their surrounding community only have real interest in helping a specific subgroup within that community, not the community as a whole. So, I don’t think the private sector has demonstrated it has the willingness to help everyone, so much as specific groups.
Yes, but that’s not what your tax dollars are actually for. The idea of government charity (welfare) using your tax dollars is that it will at least attempt to take care of people neither you nor the private organizations you favor have any real interest in helping. It’s there for the people who are the most in need, with the fewest resources, options, and support. It’s in your interest that these people get help, because their poverty and suffering typically leads to crime and other social problems that will affect you down the line in one way or another. I have no real interest in helping criminals, but I acknowledge it’s in my interest that criminals do get help in prison, because reformed ex-convicts are less likely to return to a life of crime than unreformed ex-convicts.
I understand why you say that, but I don’t think you’re looking at it from the other side as well. Conservatives regularly label anyone who doesn’t agree with them as “woke,” “Marxist,” and allege they “want to destroy the country” too, and yet the vast majority of political violence comes from the Right, not the Left. So, I don’t think that really accounts for the violence itself. Sure, those who get violent might cite extremist rhetoric from the opposite side of the political aisle, but every study that really digs deep into these people and their motivations finds they either have serious mental health issues or already adhere to a violent extremist ideology themselves to begin with.
Thanks for your input, I really do appreciate it. If you want to continue discussing these issues, I’m game, just keep your comments of this caliber, please.