If certain people on the right are so afraid of replacement, doesn't that kind of speak to how it sucks to be a minority and maybe we should agree to have basic rights to exist in America? How about whatever happens happens, and you treat everyone well. Driving away non-whites seems to be a bad strategy. I know in this day and age everyone feels empowered to speak their truth, but it's also OK to be critical and dismiss certain opinions as incoherent and nation crumbling.
Conservatives are confusing the culture war, a tactic of conservatives, with the conservative instinct and values, which is to not feel that government is the solution to problems. I can't help but try and translate conservativism to something reasonable, because I'm not hearing it articulated well. The right has become a spin producing with reality absent, or passing the hypocrisy test, so with my superior ability for empathy (sarcasm), I'm going to articulate some reasonableness.
Part of it can be aversion for taxes, and part of it can be a rugged individualism that enshrines the trauma of youth, and a distaste for authority, the disappointment when you realize how corrupt and unintegrated your parents are, despite them preaching to you to be better. The solution is no paternalism or maternalism in government. One good thing about voting is you don't have to show you vote and you could be as selfish as you want to be.
Liberalism in America, confusing because in England it it's on the other side, is better expressed as progressivism. Humans are profoundly conservative. We are happiest when the day doesn't change. It's calling audibles when humans balk. Technology is changing the world so quickly that it's hard to get your bearings and that will help the conservative instinct, in terms of wanting things not to change too quickly. One thing that could really improve our society is resisted because it changes things, even if things are always changing and they have changed for the worst.
The disgust I feel for the political arena is quite a good tactic. To just belch your bile and horribleness into the public discourse turns people away from the public discourse. People turn away from politics, and that leaves more space for the corruption we have presently. It's a feedback loop that never stops giving. Government is corrupt, reduce it. Progressives want to fight corruption and improve government. On one level it's classic do something or don't do something.
In Concord Massachusetts during Thoreau's lifetime they had debate societies, lyceum, communal education and public education, where you shared your knowledge with the town.
What is going on in America is poisoning the well. Poisoning the well is when you do something really horrible to hurt everyone, because somehow your get ahead pursuing a lose-lose strategy. When I was growing up the right was always puffing out its chest in patriotism, but it's become a Russia loving, hatred based presentation. Feels weird to try and provoke that patriotic feeling, but honestly, America can do better than it's doing.
Man against himself. As I struggle against my own self defeating traits and habits, I see America struggle against itself. It's many contradictory urges, lack of vision.
Martha Stewart complains you can't get good help that is constantly available. Kim Kardashian complains about how you can't get good help. Maybe you give better salary or hire more people and treat them well, maybe that's the solution. Powerful white women are indistinct in tone deafness to powerful white men. That is the hope of America--you can get enough money to make people listen to you. Couldn't we just listen to each other as a baseline of normal human decency? And pay a decent wage?
As long as we're all scrambling to prepare for injustice solved by money, and health care, we're going to be fostering the American dream of wanting to make it rich. In the past it was just to get nice things, now it's just to get the things we could afford in more flush times. Whether the economy has gone down or not doesn't matter. Conservatives are gaming the system better, but there's no debate or national conservation any more. Just people spouting off without discussion online. Supposedly a really abrasive online gentleman is quite nice in person. Who would have thunk it.
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