Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I apologize; I misinterpreted the question.
I don't think it's a very useful question (or at least not one I have a useful answer for), because I don't use the term except in reference to people who self-describe as such. You can look back to late 18th/early 19th century liberals, but that's a political context that's almost unrecognizable to today. I guess if you want my short answer: classical liberalism properly refers to a historical political tradition which has been succeeded by various offspring.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
How is that winning the issue?
Any Federal voter ID law actually able to make it through Congress is likely to also impose restrictions on election administration that red states don't want. Avoiding Federal standards for voter qualification and election administration gives more leeway to put their thumb on the scale.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.
Why? If you think the right shouldn't be expected to behave when they lose, why do you think they should be trusted with power?
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.
I don't really think that's true except in the vaguest sense. An argument about the effectiveness of homeschooling could theoretically be deflected by saying "it's my prerogative to not educated my children*", but very few homeschooling advocates are making that argument as opposed to arguing that homeschooling leads to superior outcomes. Arguments about outcomes in turn focus on the validity and interpretation of data.
*FWIW, existing laws on homeschooling suggest the existing consensus is "no, it isn't". Arguments about parental rights vs child's interests tend to turn on conclusions about outcomes rather than vice versa.
(I will also note that my point about unschooling was not whether or not it was good or bad relative to public schooling but that it was certainly not equivalent to handing a child a tablet with internet access and telling them to figure it out themselves; homeschooled children are usually more closely instructed than their traditional classroom peers)
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Breaking the power of Southern elites and the subsequent century of white supremacist rule in the South.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Except states set their own curricula and Southern states aren't exactly known for their wholehearted embrace of Anti-Racist memes.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Are you really saying FDR, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Revolution and the rise of the US managerialism is mostly due to.. the confederacy having been imperfectly dealt with?
I mean, at least one of them clearly is, but I rather suspect they're saying that no, they're simply not the problem. Or at least, they are not the problem with conservative politics. Rather, that the political and ideological culture of the south is a corruption in the heart of American conservatism.
However, this is @DBDr 's post, so I suppose they can speak for themself.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
I don't understand how compromise became a dirty word for modern right wing Republicans. Suddenly making a deal is a betrayal and childish, which is not only ignorant of how politics with a slim majority literally must work, but is incredibly hypocritical because of the aforementioned pageantry on the far right while the middle literally just wants to get shit done.
They're convinced that the GOP's problem is a lack of will, rather than that their political objectives are difficult, dubiously popular, and involve making tradeoffs their voters won't actually like. In fairness, in the context of intra-party negotiation, intransigence can be a benefit. Cutting a deal with the opposition is a lot more costly than cutting a deal with your own hardliners. They're also trapped by their own voters, to whom they have generally pitched the idea that there are an abundance of free lunches to be had if only the "establishment GOP" weren't too weak to eat them.
Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US. And virtually unheard of in vastly more secular Western Europe. And also that even in the US, advancing state-enforced Christianity as a remedy to mental health problems is an incredibly fringe position, even on the right.
I think a more likely explanation is that the intellectual paradigm of mainstream American conservatism simply isn't equipped to provide solutions to that kind of problem. It's like asking a progressive to come up with a scheme for regulatory reform.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Is it cohesive? It strikes me as an ad hoc, reactive stance against perceived Democratic policies. To illustrate, let me invert it:
Stop the right from torturing trans kinds, covering for police brutality, ignoring and perpetuating racism against black people, ignoring the looming climate crisis, and generally trashing the country out of reactionary spite.
Whether or not it's a fair assessment is beside the point - it is very much not a cohesive framework. It might descend from one, but as articulated it's just "we're against things our opponents are for". The only unifying theme is that whatever the right does is bad.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Only if you count any action taken against someone saying something you disagree with politically, in which case running over protestors or shooting up a drag show counts as no platforming. If you want to define it that way no one can stop you, but it seems like a semantic leap.
I characterize pulling the fire alarm (or other disruptive behavior) as extreme specifically because it is a step beyond the normal threat of social opprobrium while not crossing the line into actually violent/destructive behavior.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
It's really just an extreme form of no-platforming, isn't it?
Extreme no platforming is pulling the fire alarm, not burning down the building.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
This is such a fantastical portrait of American cities it makes me question if you've ever visited one.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
It's not like border states get a coordinated heads-up.
Border states have multiple federal agencies dedicated to the matter and receive additional federal money (paid for by blue states) to help local agencies. If Texas is having issues and Abbott wants additional assistance, he can ask for it instead of engaging in maximally disruptive stunts.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Rural, Catholic, poor, stereotyped as violent, lazy, and criminal? Maybe not that different.
The closest I can find to a hard number on Irish illegal immigrants estimates it at around 50k. Even if 100% of them were in MA, which they're not, that's still be ~200k other illegal immigrants.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Massachusetts has ~250k illegal immigrants. They're already living those values.
people who feel forced out of their own movement.
People who feel forced out of their own movement are struggling with the dissonance between their self identification, their beliefs, and the direction of the movement they used to be a part of. This is as true of ex-conservatives who stayed put or moved left while the party moved right as it is for ex-liberals who did the converse.
Me making up my own definition for a particular label has no bearing on that.
Ok, so even going by that definition I see no grounds to say classical liberals shouldn't be taken seriously on their word
I do. The issues of the late 18th century are overwhelmingly different and the label itself was largely dead until it was functionally revived by people who wanted to avoid associating their ideas with conservatism.
But the bigger factor is just that the vast majority of self-ID'd classical liberals I know have garden variety soccon views + weed while exhibiting very little interest in (or outright hostility to) the personal freedoms or civil liberties aspect of their claimed ideology. (There is also the occasional embarassed liberal and even a few sincere libertarians, but they are less common).
It's not that I think they are lying. It's that I think they're full of shit.
the claim that everyone around them moved left is plausible
It is plausible. It's also another way of saying "I got more conservative". The views that would make you socially liberal in 1954 would make you pretty reactionary in 2024, and having your views crystallize while the world continues to change is pretty much the standard form conversion story.
There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right?
There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?
I've already stated my reasons. If you don't find them compelling you're free to ignore me.
What do you think my views are?
Nope. But that's the normal standard of evidence on this forum.
Sure. Rigorously interviewing them about the specifics of their beliefs.
The Overton Window is not a bus. Politics is not oriented around a set of immovable poles. People may fix their own beliefs, but the context for those beliefs is always changing.
Once upon a time, thinking that the electorate should be all men, regardless of property, made you a liberal who wanted to massively expand the franchise. Now it would make you a radical reactionary who wants to massively reduce it.
As near as I can tell, that is exactly what makes you conservative. What should? Are we all liberals because we all reject divine right of kings? That hardly seems useful.
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