Regnad Kcin
Penultimate Amazing
Eye think you’ve got it.
Cont: Trump's Coup - Part 3
- Thread starter mgidm86
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Just so funny.
Well having gone to many, many "Right wing" forum's websites, listened to Carlson etc., I would say that the "Rights" view of the "Left" is has you say about "as reliable as one of those medieval maps that showed the location of the kingdom of Prester John and the land where people's heads are in their chests."
After all it is now mainstream "Right" opinion that the 2020 election was stolen by evil Leftists and of course the funniest "Rightest" notion is the idea that the Democrats are radical Leftists. Whatever.
Of course it is a fact that some Republicans have been promoting rabid conspiracy nonsense. (Certainly the Jan. 6th mob was full of it.) Along with the stolen election conspiracy. I could also mention the Southern strategy nonsense.
If you want to say both sides Left and Right are about equally delusional about the other that is an argument but has it stands your comment is risible. (Although the argument that centrists like the Democrats are "Left" is funny.)
I've always found Orwell to be a paradox. He could at times be so brilliant and then so blinkered. Much of what he wrote about then contemporary culture has always struck me has hysterical pearl clutching. A lot of it is pretty funny along with being a great deal of no-nothing philistinism. Orwell's analysis of Stalinism and the elitists pretensions of so many Leftists were on point. But then a lot of modern writers and commentators sort of miss his comments on right wing political movements and conservatism which he did not like very much either.
But then British Labour has, for a long time abandoned the Working Class in favour of a managerial state and supporting Capitalism. Giving the Working Class any sort of say in the management of the modes of production was dumped long ago. If anything the current Labour party supports the Capitalist economic system and has for quite sometime. Very much like the Conservatives in Britain. The chief difference being a willingness to throw in some scraps to other people not part of the economic elite.
I suppose that could be deemed better than Conservative policies that serve the economic elite more than other groups.
And of course like in the USA a lot of contemporary Conservative politics in Britain consist of pearl clutching.
Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
A sarcastic response is not a good, or any, counter argument. I suggest you read this and maybe learn something:
Eric Rauchway: Ph.D., History, Stanford University, 1996
M.A., History, Stanford University, 1993
B.A., Cum Laude in History and with Distinction in All Subjects, Cornell University, 1991
M.A., History, University of Oxford (by special resolution of congregation), 1998
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It probably depends a lot on what one means by left and right. On the right, you'd pretty much have to stop watching movies to avoid being exposed to a Democrat worldview. What would you say serves the same function to make the worldview of the right almost unavoidable to the left? My impression is the exposure is much less.
This doesn't seem correct to me. The right don't blame the average Democrat voter for 2020. They blame the GOP establishment and the Democrat party machine. I can't think of any claimed conspiracy that blames the average leftie. They still think they are misguided fools same as they've always done. Meanwhile, my Democrat friends spent the past few years saying that anybody who supported Trump was clearly a racist. This isn't a negative opinion of "the left", this is a negative opinion of political machines.
To speak to the second part of it, I think one has to unpack what one means by radical leftist. I would say that your average Democrat is not a radical, however they have absorbed a bunch of ideas like "equity" that have radical implications.
There is no point discussing what was and wasn't a conspiracy. We could start arguing now and not be finished by 2024. It's not even a very interesting question.
I didn't realise you had the True definition of Left and Right. ;-) They can mean a bunch of different things. I would generally say that Left means the side that is in some sense the inheritors of the Jacobin/Whig view of social progress. It's the side that believes in the perfectibility of man. It's the side that favours youthful idealism and reason over mature pessimism and experience.
The Right is simply what ever opposes the Left, the forces of reaction. It isn't really a clearly defined thing in the same sense.
Your average Democrat is certainly not at the vanguard of the revolution, but I think they are on the side of this spirit of social "progress" rather than opposed to it. Often they will want chunks of the revolution to stop at the point it was at when their worldview was fixed as a young adult, but that has always been the case.
I'm genuinely curious to know what definition of Left and Right you are operating with.
In my post I mentioned that the origin of the doctrine of unilateral succession at a whim originated not in any real conflict of principles of state vers Federal power but over the need to protect slavery. Before the Civil War it was a common belief and practice in the South to have absolutely NO problem with the extension of Federal power to extend / protect slavery. Thus in the South state after state had no problem with violations of "states rights" by the Federal government that extended / protected slavery. They had no trouble with the Federal government imposing slavery in a territory, (Complete with Slave Code.), they had no trouble with Territorial governments not allowed to ban or regulate slavery in anyway. And of course they saw it has a violation of "states rights" that if they could not take a slave into a territory thus demanding extraterritoriality for their laws.
After the Civil War the so-called "Lost Causers" erected a lying myth about the Civil War really being caused by a conflict between local autonomy and a potentially tyrannical Federal government. This is of course a lie. Of course counties within a state had no right to secede from the state. That type of local autonomy, could be and was crushed by the state.
The revolt was caused by the desire to keep a system of totalitarian like authority / control over c. 4 million human beings because those 4 million human being represented a vast source of wealth. In other words a revolt to support a system of tyranny.
After the Civil War "states rights" was trotted out to justify another tyrannical system of authority, jim crow, segregation. Before the Civil War and after Many Southerners had absolutely no problems supporting theses tyrannies but resented deeply, has tyranny, any effort to remove, or moderate these tyrannies. The ironies are hilarious in a sick way.
Before the Civil War many Southerners regarded with favour Supreme Court decisions that extended slavery, minimized protections for American Blacks etc. Thus for example Southern States routinely violate the rights of Black American Citizens.
The tyrannical power of State governments to screw over people was to be enhanced and any interference to lesson that tyrannical authority was of course tyranny?! Whatever.
By the eve of the Civil War it was routine in the South to denounce has a violation of "states rights" Northern state laws that absolutely forbade slavery, and in fact even the Northern state laws that in the past had there abolished slavery were denounced has violations of "states rights". Many Southerners were looking forward to a Supreme court decision that would strike down Northern laws that forbade the transit of slaves through the territory of states; a violation of "states rights" and an assertion of Federal authority.
The whole right of succession issue was little more than a paper thin rational for the real cause - the defence of slavery.
Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
Great. And when you get a degree in US History you can argue that the parties didn't switch on the same level of credibility as the US historians who completely disagree with your opinion.
Hilarious, just hilarious. Aside from the risible crap, a staple of Right Wing media that Movies are "Democrat Worldview". I could mention Fox News, and the dominance of the Right Wing on talk radio, podcasts etc. I could also mention the Evangelical media network and its captive audience. Your "impression" is a joke.
Your straw manning. It is ubiquitous by the right to accuse the "left" of stealing the election. I never said anything about the "average leftie". I said that much of the American right accuses the "left" of stealing the election. Which is a paranoid conspiracy theory of bottomless idiocy. Why do so many believe this nonsense? Well because they are being massively lied too. Your desperate attempt to say it is about political machines not individual leftists is risible. It is soo so easy to go to various forum's to find foaming at the mouth hysteria about the left. (Go to Fox News, go to OAN etc.)
Your attempt to excuse this idiocy is pretty funny. As for Trump and racists. Well a lot of Trump supporters did in fact turn out to be racists. (Some of the kooks at Jan. 6 2021 bear that out.) Has for all being racists that is obviously stupid.
Since you have not bothered to define what you mean by Leftist or Rightist I feel no need to do the same. I should also point out all ideas have "radical implications" if taken in certain direction. After Conservatism can mean a Theocracy, etc.
Why? The fact that so many "Right" people are now prey to delusions like, Qanon, the stolen election, pizzagate etc., etc., isn't very "interesting"? Whatever.
Your too funny. You have just regurgitated one of the most persistent delusions of political thinking ever. It is bluntly far more complicated than that. The implication that the "right" is 'mature" is hilarious. I suppose the stolen election crap is "mature" and so is Qanon. Whatever. I suppose the desire of so many in the USA for theocracy is "mature".
No reason to take this comment seriously at all.
Not interested in playing anymore.
Have you read his essay in response to Burnam's Managerial Revolution?
Anyway, I agree with you that he was suspicious of the right as well. My impression is that he was mainly against totalitarianism. I recall him saying in the buildup to the War that it looked like a choice between totalitarian Socialism and totalitarian Fascism and that while he thought both were bad choices, he favoured totalitarian Socialism.
Certainly, but then the Left has been moving away from the class and economics based idea of the struggle since the end of WW2. In the UK you see it happening in the 60s as Gramsci and continental philosophy comes in. Obviously that didn't displace the trades unions overnight. The utopian vision has always needed sufficient power to be centralised that all can be made right. There is nothing incompatible in that with a managerial state and a corporate oligarchy, so long as you think you are going to control it. It's not as if capitalists run these big companies any more. A hundred years ago, Henry Ford owned Ford and made the decisions. Sure the family still holds a big stake, but not a majority. Instead you have Vanguard, Blackrock and a bunch of other similar companies. Everything is owned by big investment companies. Owners of the means of production are layers of corporate structure away from the things they own. They are absent landlords. Power is almost entirely in the hands of managers. All those managers espouse the diversity, equity and inclusion rhetoric and environmental, social, and corporate governance score targets that came out of this change in the left. The left are great at taking over bureaucracies.
Certainly. That is something of an anachronism these days.
Does it? Is it the party of the small independent shopkeeper, or the person who wants to start a small business? I think rather it is the party of management. Whether that is managers in the state, or managers in multinational companies, or managers in NGOs is not much of a distinction. Have you seen Blair talk lately? The vision he sells is of a managed international world that has moved beyond politics and decisions that need to be made get made in partnerships between government, private companies and NGOs. Its a technocracy. The old leftist utopia of Marx where nobody has to work has become the utopia of Davos where you own nothing, live in a pod and get UBI while the world is taken care of by managers. That is where liberté, égalité, fraternité ultimately leads.
The Conservatives believe in very little, I think. I don't know when they last believed in anything. I guess Thatcher had a vision, but that was 12 years and isn't part of a century's long progression of a worldview. Leftwing thought in the UK goes back at least to the Whigs. At best the right slow things down for a bit before the left sets off again.
The mistake is seeing the left in Marxist terms of class struggle and workers cooperatives. That's just a particular form that it took towards the end of the 19th Century and early 20th Century.
That's a very of the Left perspective. The view on the right would be that welfare feels good and virtuous, but creates a permanent underclass. Like ending grammar schools, it felt virtuous, but it's strange how so many more working class kids seemed to make it into the first rank of society before they were closed, and how few after. If I had a general criticism of the left, it would be that they tend to be far more interested in whether something makes them feel moral than what the outcome is.
Personally, I think Conservative party politics is mostly a charade by people who mostly believe very little. Still, people who believe in nothing can often be preferable to people believe strongly in something.
I didn't think the left watched a lot of Fox News or listened to Evangelical radio, except maybe if Colbert finds something to ridicule. I think maybe you misunderstood what I said. The right can't avoid the left unless they live in a cave. Hollywood is left wing, at least in so far as it presents itself, to give one very obvious example of something that is difficult to avoid. What would the the equivalent right wing media that some college dropout working in a feminist bookstore in Portland would struggle to avoid?
What is "the left"? They are presumably not accusing a concept, or a Platonic ideal of doing this. They are talking about people. Which people? That would be mostly the Democrat political machine. Are we going to play word games here?
Again, what do you think they mean? That a concept stole the election? That a Platonic ideal stole the election? What are they actually claiming?
I'm glad you don't seem to be saying all. To me it seems very common to argue that since Trump is obviously racist with racist policies, then anybody who supports him is knowingly supporting a racist with racist policies, and hence is almost certainly a racist. You still paint the right with a wider brush than the right paints the left. Again, if we ignore sophistry and claiming that they said "the left stole the election" and look at the actual claims.... it's the Democrat party machine that is being talked about.
One would have to flesh out the actual ideas underpinning the conservativism we are talking about in order to say that. Burkian conservatism applied to the US certainly doesn't mean theocracy. Burkian conservitism is the opposite of radical. Equity as it is currently discussed is a radical concept with radical consequences.
Have you seen the length of the threads on these topics? Its a pointless discussion that will not lead to a conclusion or shared understanding. Having a pointless discussion about it doesn't interest me. I am more interested in the history of political ideas. I'm not sure that it would change anything for me if what ever set of ideas you mean here were all definitively and inarguably proved false. Given that, what's the point of arguing over it?
One can be wrong in a variety of ways. Some errors it takes a lot of education and brains to make. Being wrong isn't the same as being immature. Various forms of the old saying that if you aren't a socialist by the age of 25 you have no heart, and if you still are after 25 you have no head are very common. In youth, one sees the injustice in the world and wonders why people don't fix it. Later on one sees more and more examples of how difficult it actually is to fix things for the better. You get a family, and realise how fast time goes by and your priorities change. The quest for cosmic justice is just naturally more appealing to the young.
You tell me you won't define left and right because I haven't defined it, then later on in the post you tell me that there is no reason to comment on the definition I gave. Is your definition of left and right a secret?
Again, there are other threads if all you want to do is debunk Jan 6th conspiracy theories. I've told you what I think, and you just mock and fail to respond. It does make it very easy to defend the left and attack the right if you have a private definition of them that you won't discuss.
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There are ways that they have switched, and there are ways they haven't. In your post I don't disagree that there was a switch of the sort you describe. I do like the phrase "rhetorically committed" in there. That says a lot.
I mainly disagree with the rhetorical inferences that are drawn from claims of a switch.
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Apologies, I didn't realise I was only allowed to post if I was a credentialed academic. Do forgive me. ;-)
If you look back over my posts, you'll see that I wasn't arguing that there was no sense if which the parties had switched. I agree that there has indeed been a switch of the form recently quoted. I said that there were ways that they had and there were ways that they hadn't. What I objected to was the rhetorical use to which generalised claims of a switch are put.
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Were the North always 100% consistent with their principles? The centralising tendency of power is a natural one. Has the South somehow won, I'm sure they would have centralised sooner or later. We cry for justice and our independence when we are weak, and then want to be obeyed when we are strong. I don't have any difficulty believing that the South genuinely believed in states rights, while violating aspects of it at the same time. People are hypocrites at the best of times, and a power struggle of the sort that was going on in the 50 years up until the civil war was not the kind of thing that left a lot of room for principled detachment.
The reason counties can't succeed from states and states can't succeed from the union is because they lack the power. Rights on this point are just a justification for the action of power.
So, the winners who wrote the history were the good guys and the losers who didn't were the bad guys? What a surprise. Are these good guys who were so concerned with the lot of oppressed humanity the same people that were fighting the Indian Wars? It is convenient when doing good serves your economic and political interests at the same time.
None of this is actually an argument against states rights. There are always ways you could make the world better if only you were given just a little bit more power. Limiting that centralisation always involves accepting you aren't going to be able to force a solution to something that offends you. This is an argument for a virtuous authoritarian tyranny.
I agree, terrible things happened. None of this is a secret.
Yes. Obviously. Centralising power in this way is necessarily tyrannical. Hopefully it is a virtuous tyranny, that's about the best one can say.
I like all this "many southerners". How many?
What a remarkably clean narrative. It really turns the whole thing into a morality tale where the good guys took a break from killing Indians to fight a noble war to free their fellow men before going back to killing Indians. Again, it is the most amazing coincidence that the good guys were the winners and the war also served their economic and political interests. Such are the coincidences of history, I suppose?
Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
No one claimed they were 'just the same' at all as your comment included. Unless we missed the Democratic platform of today including the Fugitive Slave Act, the Homestead Act the demand to admit Kansas as a state, and building a railroad to the Pacific?
No ****: see above. But the way of looking at the role of and power of the federal government, immigration, preservation of the Union, etc absolutely has.
For example?
Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
You're forgiven, but don't let it happen again or I'll have to release the Kraken.
Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
The Deputy AG, Lisa Monaco, has said the DOJ is investigating the fake elector certifications fraudulently sent to the National Archives by groups in seven states. Be afraid, morons, be very afraid. Including R Giuliani.
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That comment was sarcasm. I've addressed what people claimed specifically in other posts. Having said that, you did say:
That may have mislead me into thinking you were making a rather broad claim.
We can perhaps abstract those policies into their motivating ideas and agree there is more going on there than a position on limited government. Again, you were the one who said they "basically swapped platforms keeping only their names". Now you are arguing with me that there are all these other things in their platform that I'm not taking into account?
These are a collection of ideas that when you are the dominant power in the Union you will favour because they make you stronger, and if you are the weaker power you will be against because they make you weaker. They are not remotely independent variables. I'm not sure that one could be in favour of centralising federal power and against the preservation of the union coherently without some very extreme circumstances. It's a trivial observation.
Again, as I have said already, my main objection is with the rhetorical use that these "the parties have switched" statement is put to. The Republicans represented the ascendant force within the union in 1870, so of course they were pro federal power. The Republicans are in the opposite position in 2022, so of course they tell their base they are against it. I had a look back, in 1984 when Reagan got his huge win, Mondale still got 85% of the vote in DC. In '72 when Nixon won everything DC was 78% Democrat. The federal government has been Democrat for a long time.
Look, we've gone from you saying that the Republicans and Democrats have "basically swapped platforms keeping only their names" to restricting that to a particular set of policies positions centered on centralising power in the federal government. I disagreed with the original broad statement, I'm not sure that I disagree with the current statement.
If we go back to your original claim that Republicans "refused to believe the two parties basically swapped platforms keeping only their names", what is it about it that they refuse to accept? Are we talking about the narrow claim that it is about limited government? Are you saying that they think Lincoln was a states rights, limited federal power kind of a President, or do they think the Republican Party's current platform is about centralising power in the Federal government?
Let's stick with your example. What is the claim about the parties having swapped attempting to get them to agree to that they are rejecting. It feels to me like something beyond their views on centralised power is involved here.
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That seems a bit unlikely. It's not very hard to skew things by a few points here or there, but it would take more than some questionable boundary decisions and voter ID to make it "impossible to kick them out of power, regardless of what the electorate desires".
To do that, you need a power equal to or greater than they have to stop them. What is that power, and how do you prevent it from falling into the hands of the power hungry?
I guess there is the threat of violent revolution. Did you have something else in mind?
Maybe he is. On the one hand he didn't survive too long at the top, on the other I haven't read enough about his life to really say. You don't become President without a bunch of people with a bunch of money backing you over a bunch of hyper competitive power hungry lunatics. I guess sometimes the joke candidate gets too much of a lead before anybody has quite realised what's happening. Doubtless there are other ways that the wrong kind of person can make it to the Oval Office, but I think it requires some kind of glitch in the matrix for this to happen.