With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
Matty Y thinks he has the answers for the Democratic Party. It's a pretty good list but it shows an astounding lack of self-awareness: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1854334397157384421
How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet? Hopefully the Trump administration can build a big tent that includes these people, but I'd also settle for a less insane Democratic party.
Here's Matty's list:
Economic self-interest for the working class includes robust economic growth
Climate change is a reality to manage not a hard limit to obey
The government should prioritize the interests of normal people over those of people who engage in antisocial conduct
We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin
While race is a social construct, biological sex is not
Academics and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private sector workers
Politeness is a virtue but obsessive language policing alienates normal people and degrades the quality of thinking
We are equal in the eyes of God, but the American government can and should prioritize the interests of American citizens
Public services must be run in the interests of their users not their providers
Edit: I found another one, this time by the "Liberal Patriot" Ruy Teixeira. When will these people realize that they are essentially Republicans now?
'Race is a social construct'
I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.
But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.
We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.
Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).
"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."
"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."
Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".
One thing I find interesting about this is that if we continue to shave "minorities" off of the "minority" list and add them onto the "white" if they vote a certain way, we will have built a more diverse coalition of "whites" than "minorities." "White" now contains Asians, Whites, and Latinos.
Most Asian American group lean Democrat,with few exceptions (Vietnamese lean Republican), none of them vote R as strongly as whites.
Asians have already been put in the White category for overperforming other minorities (and even whites) in school grades and earnings. Further, I think that they're way more fickle than a lot of other demographics. (East) Asians are much less political than other races until someone messes with their schools. You see this repeatedly in California, where every single initiative to make schools more "equitable" guarantees that Asians vote against it.
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