I'm a lifelong conservative, but I am disillusioned with the republicans. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the left of center, just FYI. I suspect I am much more right leaning than you, but we are otherwise twins in this context. I am so sick of being lied to by both sides of the political aisle. We need to completely trash both parties, and then we can get back to a healthy discussion of the issues.. how do we fairly and humanely deal with immense numbers of people who want to come into our country without documentation? How do we walk the delicate balance between secular government and tightly held religious beliefs? How do we best help people who do not have enough access to money, food, housing, etc? ... It's time to drop all the hyperbole and lies around racism, different sexual preferences, etc and just focus on the meat of what we can improve together.
I feel like we could sit down, however many issues we might view differently, and figure out what we have in common and also zero in on some of the tensions and major trade offs that can keep issues polarized. I’m sure there are still plenty of more traditional liberal Dems with whom I could so that, too. It’s the jargon-spewing, name-calling people who have developed hardened ideological views around identity which they seek to import into and enforce in every context who seemingly refuse to have reasonable discussions. For instance, my old running club has been seized by aggressively sanctimonious millennials - people who were happy making bank themselves while speaking exactly zero truth to power at places like Citibank - who have been relentlessly trying to shame really kind, generous, welcoming older members of the club - truly community-minded people of all backgrounds - for daring to hold or attend events, due to their pernicious “whiteness”. Actually privileged (credentialed) people sending multiple long messages full of hyperlinks to tedious whiteness studies journal articles and lambasting everyone in the club who is white for their intolerable whiteness while smugly claiming they’re not attacking human beings for daring to be part of the positive inclusive community they built - just critiquing an oppressive construct - to the entire membership of what was already a very diverse and welcoming running club. Those people are impossible to talk with. They’ll literally try to tell you these are all closed issues - there is a consensus among relevant academics that they apparently need to recreationally invade community hobby groups and clubs and bully people like a softer Cultural Revolution. But I simultaneously consider a more traditional conservative Republican like Mitch McConnell as slyly cynical and dishonest as they come. There is seemingly a huge disjunction between the broader tenuously working and middle class base of the Republican Party (which is gradually diversifying- good news) and the leadership which is still in my view far too wedded to a brand of corporatism which primarily benefits the kind of big capital and very wealthy individuals who are in practice if not rhetoric no more connected or committed to the interests of this country and its people than ideological left-wingers who think having and being part of a country is racist.
Immigration is such a fascinating and challenging topic. I run into trouble with people left of center when I ask basic adult questions: how many people? and according to what criteria? If people can’t answer that or won’t at least try, they’re fundamentally unserious. I just saw a post by Freddie de Boer about the damaging dynamic between insider centrists and culturally and media-ascendant lefties in the Democratic Party, in which he stated he was a “let everyone in who wants to come guy”. This is a sort of pragmatic yet sincerely materialist Marxist writer and I have no clue how “let everyone in” (how is this not tacitly more or less latest the current Admin’s policy?) coexists with a functioning welfare state, environmental protection and trying to slow resource consumption and pollution fueling runaway climate change? I’m sure there are smart people who have come up with rhetorically appealing arguments. But trying to combine support of effectively if not overly open borders and a push for DSA-style social welfare state, and trying to protect and preserve our natural inheritance, including wildlife, is just fundamentally incoherent to me. But then most Republicans in leadership seem happy to demagogue about immigration while never actually being serious about cracking down on the demand side and their business allies’ demands for ever cheaper and pliable labor. Bloomberg of all places actually covered trafficking networks using migrant minors to fill jobs in slaughterhouses across the South. One of my favorite (and for some reason least popular) arguments is that mass illegal immigration is being used (abused, exploited) to prop up the worst cruelty of Big Ag’s indefensible business model. To go a step further would it really be shocking if the people who run slaughterhouses (and other cruel, dangerous, dirty businesses) didn’t have some kind of business relationship with the cartels, who are essentially being heavily subsidized by current federal government policy, so that they can in a sense order supplies of the most desperate workers with the least leverage to complain about anything. I feel like the Tucker Carlson types would be intrigued - until pivoting to: wait, are you one of the unAmerican weirdos whose against cheap meat mass-produced by any means. And most everyone on the left would only want to accuse me of “victim-blaming” inherently holier than thou immigrants. I don’t know if we’ll see the fruits of a true party realignment in our lifetimes. As Ruy Teixeira keeps writing, most of the voters in both parties - and in all racial and ethnic groups - are economically somewhat more liberal (is anyone really against allowing the federal government to bargain for lower drug prices, or for adding a dental benefit to Medicare?) but socially/culturally more moderate. I’d like to see a big tent, explicitly transracial working class coalition that’s culturally moderate but defends shared liberal Enlightenment values. I think countries matter as shared polities in which citizens can at least exercise some sort of participatory democratic role. But the elites in both parties seem increasingly detached from even supporting a notional idea of belonging to a common place and political nation.
Yeah, exactly. You and I are fundamentally opposites on the actual political spectrum it sounds like (which is ABSOLUTELY fine), but we have plenty in common in just, good old fashioned common sense and, probably, decency and respect for others. I want to shrink the government out of existence. I absolutely don’t want people to go without food, housing or medical care, and I don’t want to waste the earth’s resources, but i completely believe that the government is actually in the way of us improving these things. I also don’t think i have any right to control the choices anyone else makes, as long as those choices are within the bounds of the law. However, I do insist on having the same respect and deference shown to me and my rights in regards to my choices as a person and as a parent. We can debate the best solutions for these issues, like adults, exactly as you said. But when either side (or both) of the two controlling political classes are bent on causing division, not lessening it, they need to go. Along with their supporters (those intolerant millennials you speak of, and the GOP old guard). The sooner the better.
This has been fascinating reading, and I appreciate the everyone's going at it so respectfully. I doubt, however -- this is for Tyler -- that a "reasonable discussion," can be had by someone who sees the social-democratic policies of the mid-20th century as a good thing and someone who wants to "shrink the government out of existence". If there's reasonable middle ground there, I'd be happy if you could point me in its direction. Some disagreements, I'm afraid, will forever remain heated -- or irresolvable, absent political power.
E.W.R.: Your critique resonates with much of what I've come to see, courtesy of Thomas Frank (LISTEN, LIBERAL) as the flawed approach of the current Dem ascendency. While giving lip-service to working people the DNC has since Carter embraced a neoliberal technocratic "meritocracy" that has created an educated, hereditary upper middle class that has left working people in the dust while still pretending to embrace traditional liberal values. This is the dirty secret I think you're suggesting when the hard left doesn't want to hear that economic frustration and resentment of entrenched elites, not merely racism, accounts for Trump's appeal; nor does the Dem political class want to hear that's it's lip service to working people is evident to anyone paying attention.
But there is also a growing cadre of reasonable people seeking exactly the kind of return to fact-based debate you seek: Yascha Mounk at Persuasion is one example. George Packer at the Atlantic has written about it recently. Catherine Liu's VIRTUE HOARDERS goes after the whole self-congratulatory notion of the left that it represents "the good people." Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge attacks the extremist pieties and anti-democratic impulses on both right and left. But I don't think we're getting out of this particular political moment without more ugliness, because it's just so much easier to strike a virtuous pose than it is to actually try to solve problems. But even here on this forum, there's often more heat than light. Meaning there's no "safe place" for folks like us, and we shouldn't want one.
P.S. Richard Rorty made many of the same critiques of the elitist left in ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.”
I'm a lifelong conservative, but I am disillusioned with the republicans. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the left of center, just FYI. I suspect I am much more right leaning than you, but we are otherwise twins in this context. I am so sick of being lied to by both sides of the political aisle. We need to completely trash both parties, and then we can get back to a healthy discussion of the issues.. how do we fairly and humanely deal with immense numbers of people who want to come into our country without documentation? How do we walk the delicate balance between secular government and tightly held religious beliefs? How do we best help people who do not have enough access to money, food, housing, etc? ... It's time to drop all the hyperbole and lies around racism, different sexual preferences, etc and just focus on the meat of what we can improve together.
I feel like we could sit down, however many issues we might view differently, and figure out what we have in common and also zero in on some of the tensions and major trade offs that can keep issues polarized. I’m sure there are still plenty of more traditional liberal Dems with whom I could so that, too. It’s the jargon-spewing, name-calling people who have developed hardened ideological views around identity which they seek to import into and enforce in every context who seemingly refuse to have reasonable discussions. For instance, my old running club has been seized by aggressively sanctimonious millennials - people who were happy making bank themselves while speaking exactly zero truth to power at places like Citibank - who have been relentlessly trying to shame really kind, generous, welcoming older members of the club - truly community-minded people of all backgrounds - for daring to hold or attend events, due to their pernicious “whiteness”. Actually privileged (credentialed) people sending multiple long messages full of hyperlinks to tedious whiteness studies journal articles and lambasting everyone in the club who is white for their intolerable whiteness while smugly claiming they’re not attacking human beings for daring to be part of the positive inclusive community they built - just critiquing an oppressive construct - to the entire membership of what was already a very diverse and welcoming running club. Those people are impossible to talk with. They’ll literally try to tell you these are all closed issues - there is a consensus among relevant academics that they apparently need to recreationally invade community hobby groups and clubs and bully people like a softer Cultural Revolution. But I simultaneously consider a more traditional conservative Republican like Mitch McConnell as slyly cynical and dishonest as they come. There is seemingly a huge disjunction between the broader tenuously working and middle class base of the Republican Party (which is gradually diversifying- good news) and the leadership which is still in my view far too wedded to a brand of corporatism which primarily benefits the kind of big capital and very wealthy individuals who are in practice if not rhetoric no more connected or committed to the interests of this country and its people than ideological left-wingers who think having and being part of a country is racist.
Immigration is such a fascinating and challenging topic. I run into trouble with people left of center when I ask basic adult questions: how many people? and according to what criteria? If people can’t answer that or won’t at least try, they’re fundamentally unserious. I just saw a post by Freddie de Boer about the damaging dynamic between insider centrists and culturally and media-ascendant lefties in the Democratic Party, in which he stated he was a “let everyone in who wants to come guy”. This is a sort of pragmatic yet sincerely materialist Marxist writer and I have no clue how “let everyone in” (how is this not tacitly more or less latest the current Admin’s policy?) coexists with a functioning welfare state, environmental protection and trying to slow resource consumption and pollution fueling runaway climate change? I’m sure there are smart people who have come up with rhetorically appealing arguments. But trying to combine support of effectively if not overly open borders and a push for DSA-style social welfare state, and trying to protect and preserve our natural inheritance, including wildlife, is just fundamentally incoherent to me. But then most Republicans in leadership seem happy to demagogue about immigration while never actually being serious about cracking down on the demand side and their business allies’ demands for ever cheaper and pliable labor. Bloomberg of all places actually covered trafficking networks using migrant minors to fill jobs in slaughterhouses across the South. One of my favorite (and for some reason least popular) arguments is that mass illegal immigration is being used (abused, exploited) to prop up the worst cruelty of Big Ag’s indefensible business model. To go a step further would it really be shocking if the people who run slaughterhouses (and other cruel, dangerous, dirty businesses) didn’t have some kind of business relationship with the cartels, who are essentially being heavily subsidized by current federal government policy, so that they can in a sense order supplies of the most desperate workers with the least leverage to complain about anything. I feel like the Tucker Carlson types would be intrigued - until pivoting to: wait, are you one of the unAmerican weirdos whose against cheap meat mass-produced by any means. And most everyone on the left would only want to accuse me of “victim-blaming” inherently holier than thou immigrants. I don’t know if we’ll see the fruits of a true party realignment in our lifetimes. As Ruy Teixeira keeps writing, most of the voters in both parties - and in all racial and ethnic groups - are economically somewhat more liberal (is anyone really against allowing the federal government to bargain for lower drug prices, or for adding a dental benefit to Medicare?) but socially/culturally more moderate. I’d like to see a big tent, explicitly transracial working class coalition that’s culturally moderate but defends shared liberal Enlightenment values. I think countries matter as shared polities in which citizens can at least exercise some sort of participatory democratic role. But the elites in both parties seem increasingly detached from even supporting a notional idea of belonging to a common place and political nation.
Yeah, exactly. You and I are fundamentally opposites on the actual political spectrum it sounds like (which is ABSOLUTELY fine), but we have plenty in common in just, good old fashioned common sense and, probably, decency and respect for others. I want to shrink the government out of existence. I absolutely don’t want people to go without food, housing or medical care, and I don’t want to waste the earth’s resources, but i completely believe that the government is actually in the way of us improving these things. I also don’t think i have any right to control the choices anyone else makes, as long as those choices are within the bounds of the law. However, I do insist on having the same respect and deference shown to me and my rights in regards to my choices as a person and as a parent. We can debate the best solutions for these issues, like adults, exactly as you said. But when either side (or both) of the two controlling political classes are bent on causing division, not lessening it, they need to go. Along with their supporters (those intolerant millennials you speak of, and the GOP old guard). The sooner the better.
This has been fascinating reading, and I appreciate the everyone's going at it so respectfully. I doubt, however -- this is for Tyler -- that a "reasonable discussion," can be had by someone who sees the social-democratic policies of the mid-20th century as a good thing and someone who wants to "shrink the government out of existence". If there's reasonable middle ground there, I'd be happy if you could point me in its direction. Some disagreements, I'm afraid, will forever remain heated -- or irresolvable, absent political power.
E.W.R.: Your critique resonates with much of what I've come to see, courtesy of Thomas Frank (LISTEN, LIBERAL) as the flawed approach of the current Dem ascendency. While giving lip-service to working people the DNC has since Carter embraced a neoliberal technocratic "meritocracy" that has created an educated, hereditary upper middle class that has left working people in the dust while still pretending to embrace traditional liberal values. This is the dirty secret I think you're suggesting when the hard left doesn't want to hear that economic frustration and resentment of entrenched elites, not merely racism, accounts for Trump's appeal; nor does the Dem political class want to hear that's it's lip service to working people is evident to anyone paying attention.
But there is also a growing cadre of reasonable people seeking exactly the kind of return to fact-based debate you seek: Yascha Mounk at Persuasion is one example. George Packer at the Atlantic has written about it recently. Catherine Liu's VIRTUE HOARDERS goes after the whole self-congratulatory notion of the left that it represents "the good people." Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge attacks the extremist pieties and anti-democratic impulses on both right and left. But I don't think we're getting out of this particular political moment without more ugliness, because it's just so much easier to strike a virtuous pose than it is to actually try to solve problems. But even here on this forum, there's often more heat than light. Meaning there's no "safe place" for folks like us, and we shouldn't want one.
P.S. Richard Rorty made many of the same critiques of the elitist left in ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.”