Holy shit man
When Democrats have control of Congress and the White House they pass all sorts of legislation to advance the public good, aid workers, care for the poor and disabled, strengthen public education, and provide for the needs of ordinary people. Occasionally they overreach or their programs don’t work or even backfire; they then fix them or try something different.
When rightwingers run our government, though, they pass laws like Taft-Hartley that gutted union rights, rip up voting rights, make it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and timber companies to clear-cut, and dial back people’s access to welfare and healthcare programs. And, of course, start wars (Grenada, Iraq/Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq) and pass tax cuts for their billionaire patrons.
Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, and Biden all proposed and put into law sweeping programs to build America and enhance the public good ranging from Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and greater funding for education.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump all went for tax cuts for billionaires and worked to gut or privatize the agencies, infrastructure, and programs Democrats had set up.
There’s a reason for this.
— Leftwing governments believe in democracy, and so try to accomplish what’s best for the majority of people while protecting the rights of the minority; rightwing governments practice autocracy on behalf of the morbidly rich. Sometimes, like the old USSR or modern Venezuela, repressive and authoritarian rightwing governments pretend to be left-wing, but the police state aspects of their governance give the game away.
— Rightwingers don’t see democracy as a benefit or even an ideal; they see it as an impediment to further comforting the already-comfortable while enriching themselves in the process. Instead of building up disaster preparedness through strengthening, for example, FEMA, they work to redirect those government dollars back to their friends through things like $600 billion a year in oil industry subsidies and over $20 trillion (cumulatively) in Republican tax cuts to billionaires since 1981.
The result — when rightwingers are in charge — is government that’s not paying attention to real threats and, when they come, responds with profound incompetence or cynical exploitation
I do have some disagreements around the edges of this but God damn it’s refreshing to see someone in mainstream media set their sights on what’s actually going on, and then go straight for the throat and keep digging.
Craziest part to me is how successful some right wing groups are at convincing the poor to follow along. Those that quite literally benefit the most from the social programs are willing to vote against their own interests to support the elites.
How mind boggling is it that rednecks are literally willing to overthrow their beloved country for a NY trust fund baby and reality TV star? Then he goes and helps the rich even more and they love him for it. He pisses all over “law and order” and the military. They don’t care. Just wild.
I know a lot of their feelings come from fringe topics like immigration/sexuality, but it’s still amazing considering the economic situation they’re facing. The lack of education and critical thinking is evident.
Because hating an outgroup is always easier than accepting that current hardship is the result of a complex interplay of factors that aren’t entirely understood and that might require counterintuitive solutions that aren’t guaranteed to work.
“Capitalism is good, therefore being rich is good” seems logically consistent, thus “too much concentration of wealth is bad for capitalist societies” is nontrivial and requires some mental work to understand. If the other guy says “nah, rich people are cool; it’s those other people that are different from you that run everything” it’s more immediately palatable.
So how do you get poor people to back the interests of rich people instead of their own? Segregate them and blame subsets of them. Don’t Be a Sucker is as relevant today as it was in 1947.
They’re not the poor. They’re temporarily disenfranchised billionaires who just haven’t joined their contemporaries yet. They’ll never see themselves as the poor.
They spend literally billions of dollars a year on arranging for propaganda in order to create this outcome. It’s sad that it works so well yeah, but they’re pretty good at it and they have effectively all the money and talent in the world to make it happen.
Go off, MSN.
Because it’s not possible to bully a crisis?
Not quite, a lot of military problems actually can be bullied away. TL;DR it’s because they don’t give a shit
This is really insightful.
Ummmm… where do people get the idea that the Dems aren’t right-wing?
If you are pro-capitalist, you’re right-wing - no ifs, ands, or buts.
There are many flavors of political views and you can be left, or left-center and still support free markets and capitalism.
Believe it or not, it’s possible for a person to hold right and left ideals simultaneously. As an example, you could say that a person is to the right or left of what you believe and that is much less of a blanket generalization.
or left-center and still support free markets and capitalism.
Absolutely not. There is no such thing as “leftist capitalism.”
What is left and right is really simple - you are either for dismantling systems of power and privilege (left) or you are protecting systems of power and privilege (right). The (so-called) “center” is merely politics that performs the latter while pretending to sympathize with the former.
Believe it or not, it’s possible for a person to hold right and left ideals simultaneously.
No, it isn’t - you can’t be “half-pregnant.” If your politics protects power and privilege it’s perfectly clear what politics you ascribe to… it doesn’t matter what you may personally feel about this or that irrelevant little disagreement you may have with your fellow travellers regarding the details. A person that believes abortion should only be allowed “in cases of rape” is no less right-wing (ie, misogynist and patriarchal in this case) than a person that wants it abolished altogether.
Idk man you can definitely have boyh left and right views at the same time. Like for example i believe in the so called right’s ideology of a smaller government, but i think this should be achieved by stripping away 90% of programs and installing a realistic universal basic income and a nationlized medical system. Which are two leftist ideas. I mean why would there be need so many different programs if everyone had their basic needs met.
Now that would indeed cause a ton of people to lose their jobs. It would also point out the most truely hopeless people who take what they are given and screw up constantly. Our current system trys to stem the amount of abusers by making everything so convoluted which ends up harming people really in need, along with cost so much money.
Which are two leftist ideas.
Neither of these…
realistic universal basic income and a nationlized medical system.
…are leftist ideas at all. A government having to shoulder the burden of dealing with the consequences of capitalism isn’t leftist (UBI). Neither is a state doing the bare minimum of what states have always been supposed to do (state-run healthcare).
But this…
Our current system trys to stem the amount of abusers
…ie, focusing on the miniscule amount of “abuse” done by the people without power and privilege in a society as opposed to the gargantuan amount of damage caused by those with power and privilege - now that is textbook punch-down-kiss-up right-wing ideology speaking.
So far, the only ideological understanding you have expressed here (so far) is a right-wing one.
So, by your logic, everyone that holds any left wing principles should actually be full-blood communists and all right wingers are, by default, Nazis.
I just wanted to clear that up because that is how people seem to be interpreting your hard-line stance.
everyone that holds any left wing principles
Ther is only one left-wing principle of any relevance to this discussion - the challenging and dismantling of systems of power and privilege. There is also only one right-wing principle of any relevance to this discussion - the protection and expansion of systems of power and privilege. Whether the systems of power and privilege go full-Nazi simply depends on how insecure said systems are at any given moment.
I just wanted to clear that up because that is how people seem to be interpreting your hard-line stance.
It’s not a hard-line stance at all - it’s just one with all the clickibait fairy tales stripped away. No, they’re interpreting it that way because a lot of right-wingers are quite shocked when they find out that they are, in fact, pro-status quo right-wingers and not the (supposed) “enlightened centrists” they believed themselves to be. We call right-wingers reactionaries for a reason.
I’ll agree that the Democrats are a conservative party. There’s a tiny section of it that consists of a handful of actual left wingers and their names come up in the press because they’re so unique and out of step with the general DC zeitgeist.
At the same time, I think the point the article is trying to make – that the Democrats at least are trying in their conservative way to do something that benefits some segment of the population some of the time, while the Republicans are simply and unapologetically trying to get their hands on whatever they can steal, and if the empire crumbles while they’re doing it then oh well – is something that should be said a lot more often in the mainstream press. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could argue with a straight face that it’s not true.
Hmmm interesting, so it is impossible for a right-wing gov to handle a crisis but somehow and at the same time impossible for a left-wing gov to avoid creating multiple crisis with their policies. Damn democracy. 😀
George Bush is responsible for Hamas control of Gaza
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19215537
June 15, 2007
[The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel’s departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.]
Everyone knew Bush was incompetent at his job. Look at how many huge fuckups the guy had.
Bush Fuckup #1: Letting Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora instead of ordering the thousands of nearby US troops to go get him.
Bush Fuckup #2: Ignoring the many CIA warnings about 9/11 before 9/11
Bush Fuckup #3: Being the last person in the country to understand how bad the flooding in New Orleans was.
Bush Fuckup #4:Tanking the stock market and the US economy in his last year in office.
Bush Fuckup #5 Wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in government bailouts because he tanked the economy.
Bush Fuckup #6 Giving Hamas control over Gaza.
Guess that by the number of downvotes left and right wing operate differently in US than they do here (Europe). Let me tell you, what happens here is that the left gets into gov until they waste all the money and does all the corrupt contracts that drive countries into extreme debt and other issues, then the right wing has to pick up the pieces and rebuild thing / countries so they might function again.
