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This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.
You're not wrong, you're just not describing anything more than unreflective tribalism. Leftists do it, rightists do it.
Of course I understand the point you are trying to make is "Yeah, but we're right. If we abandoned leftist policies and embraced rightist policies, things would be better."
Okay. Years of watching both fail does not convince me.
The right wing hasn't been failing on crime for years. We had left wing, soft on crime policies in the 70s and 80s, epitomized by Willie Horton, and crime was high. In the 90s we moved towards right wing policies like 3 Strikes laws and crime rates improved rapidly. Now left wing cities are going soft on crime by electing activist DAs and they are becoming unlivable and stores are closing. Right wing, harsh on crime policies demonstrably work in the United States and they do so consistently.
Both sides think they're right but both sides don't have the same track record.
Sure, my own views on crime are pretty "right wing." (And to be honest, they've only moved a little bit lately; I've never been a good liberal, really.)
I'm not a right-winger because I disagree with their views on many other things (economic, social, moral). I know the common right-wing rejoinder is "Well, it all goes hand in hand, if you don't buy into trad morality and right-wing economics, you must inevitably accept leftist social policy in all things." It's just a hair removed from Christians who claim that no moral government is possible without believing in Jesus.
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It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side. Many people, noting their local (R) government isn't solving the problems it said it would and they're actually getting worse, will vote (D) next time (e.g. Jacksonville, FL). But the other side will never do that, short of crime as high as it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- and even then they'll go back.
"Most of us are rational voters who will update our priors as necessary, but most of them are low-information NPCs."
Yes, I have been hearing this, from both sides, since I was old enough to vote.
If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes, at least not in a timespan of less than a generation, and a lot of shades of purple. If Democrats were never motivated by the perceived failures of Democratic leadership to vote Republican, Trump would not have won.
We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas. It might be very comforting to insist on symmetry, but it just isn't true. The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.
Really? You think there is not a single Republican voter in Portland or San Francisco?
When polls indicate the population at large is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, it's impossible for Democrats to simultaneously have all blue areas locked down while no red areas are.
So I know that one of your ongoing themes is that the game is rigged, leftists have already won, and they're going to stomp on your face forever.
If Trump wins again (an event I consider unlikely but not impossible at this point), will that update your priors?
Not that large an area, but precincts and groups of precincts with more people than your average rural county.
Mathematically, this just means your mixed areas lean Republican enough to balance out the walls of blue. There's nothing contradictory about it.
If Biden wins again (or his (D) replacement in 2024 in the event he is replaced), will that update yours?
So Democrats have managed to strategically place themselves so that they have a lock on large swaths of blue areas and can still flip red areas, everywhere? No, that math does not work out.
Do you mean my priors that Democrats haven't achieved One Party status and will not win forever and ever? No, Biden winning again would not convince me I'm wrong about that. Will Trump winning convince you that you are?
Then you have no intellectual skin in the game; you are asking me to commit to abandon my position while making no commitment to accept it.
Your proposition is ridiculous. You're making a claim that Democrats will win forever. I am saying no they won't. You are asking me if I will be convinced that Democrats will win forever if they win next time. I say no. I asked you if you will be convinced Democrats will not win forever if they don't win next time. Crickets.
I'm sure you can see the logical difference in these propositions, eve if you will not acknowledge them.
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There hasn't been a rightist government in Anglo countries in living memory as far as I am aware, so seeing right wing policies implimented and failing is a surprise. Can you outline where and when? - roughly, no need to detail specific if low on morale and energy, just gesture in the vague direction if posisble please :-)
I suspect this will devolve into "No true rightist..." ("True conservativism has never been tried?"). But Reagan and Thatcher, off the top of my head (and arguably both Bush administrations).
I know no true rightist blah blah, but those seem in hindsight to be incredibly liberal governments. As a rule of thumb I'd say moderate, center right, socially conservative positions would include E.g., reintroducing criminal penalties including imprisonment terms for buggery and related offences - said here not to spark debate about that issue, but to highlight just how far outside the realm of actual serious policy positions moderate right wing view is from "right wing" governments.
Economically sortof laissez faire, sometimes, does not make a right wing government and that's the core of my contention here.
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Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right? Reagan, the guy who signed one of the largest illegal immigration amnesties in U.S. history? Bush, the guy who championed No Child Left Behind? These are your “failed right-wing governments*?
Yes, I do know that. Hence my comment about "No true rightist." I know rightists also believe that Clinton and Obama were left-wing, despite many, many policies they executed which were not remotely leftist.
If you tell me no government to the left of Mussolini or Pinochet is actually right-wing, then of course you won't be able to find many "right-wing governments" in the Anglo-sphere in living memory.
Yes, correct, that is precisely what we are arguing. There has been no right-wing government in the Anglosphere in living memory. Hell, a government wouldn’t even need to be as far right as Pinochet or Franco or Mussolini to qualify; sadly, we haven’t gotten anything even in the same ballpark as those guys. To me that’s just indisputably obvious. So, telling me that right-wing Anglosphere governments have failed in your lifetime is a non-sequitur.
Let's keep in mind the context here--the examples given of rightist/right wing policies are tough-on-crime things like Three Strikes. Whether that's "right wing government" or not is not really relevant: it's a less-progressive stance than the alternative at the time.
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This is the mirror image of a marxist who insists nothing short of immediate full communism is real leftism, and therefore there has never been any real leftist government.
Right and left are relative. Even Mussolini was not especially right-wing by the standards of pre-French Revolution Europe.
No, it’s not, because the difference is that full right-wing governance has been tried. We have actual real-world examples of what it looks like. Therefore, we can draw conclusions about actual examples, and do not need to rely on empty hypotheticals and speculation. We can easily recognize that there are qualitative differences between the governance of Reagan and the governance of Francisco Franco, or, as you astutely note, the governments of basically every European country on earth 300 years ago. So, I don’t have to measure real-world governments against an imaginary utopia; I can measure them against other real-world governments that exist right now, as well as countless real-world governments that have existed in the past.
Okay, replace "immediate full communism" with "Soviet socialism," then. The point is Bush really was right-wing and Obama really was left-wing in the context of the 21st century United States, because those terms are relative, despite the fact that things could always be right-er (or left-er).
If twentieth-century European fascism is your ideal, I don't think that much recommends full right-wing governance, but I suppose that's a matter of taste.
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Okay, well, if your model for a "good" right-wing government is Mussolini or Pinochet, you're doing a poor job convincing me this is a bad thing.
Fair enough, but you have zero good examples to convince me that right-wingers would do better. Arguing that the problem with Reagan and Thatcher is that they weren't right-wing enough certainly doesn't sell me on this.
You’ve already massively moved the goalposts. Your initial argument is that right-wing Anglosphere governments - which you defined as Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush - have demonstrably failed to produce good results. You have now switched to “Alright, there haven’t been any actual right-wing Anglosphere governments, so I haven’t actually witnessed one producing bad results, but *you can’t prove that they wouldn’t have been bad if they had existed.*”
Yes. They're about as right-wing as we've had, and your argument is "They weren't right-wing enough." Why do you expect me to accept your premise, that they weren't "really" right-wingers and had they been actual right-wingers - like Mussolini and Pinochet - they would have been successful? Because your "actual" right-wingers look even worse to me.
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Am I missing something or is the switch primarily a result of your argument? You didn't defend Reagan, Thatcher, or Bush, and said yourself there were no rightwing governments in the anglosphere... like, what else is he supposed to say? Is it ok if he brings up Pinochet or Mussolini as right-wing failure modes?
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