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Interesting perspective

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Pugnate:

W7RE:
This might be the best political statement I've heard in a decade or more.

Quemaqua:
Was just having a conversation about this with my sister and mother, both of whom are hyper-conservative in most regards and who have at times labeled me a liberal even though I'm not, strictly speaking. It's not just the fault of the left, however—although in this case he's totally right about a lot of that. It's the fault of basically everyone, because everyone is a knee-jerk reactionary about basically everything these days. Even if you're actually moderate, if you say the wrong thing you'll immediately get labeled a liberal or a conservative and be totally written off by people in whatever camp.

I continue to say that partisan politics will be the death of this country. We have no room for real ideas anymore.

scottws:
I agree with Que.  This guy is right in the sense that the left has created an environment where people with socially conservative views are basically Puritans that should be silenced, ignored, or shamed.  Not that I don't myself agree.  You are free to practice any religion you like in this country so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of someone else.  How does someone else's lifestyle or beliefs have any impact on you, individually?  Trying to force specific beliefs on other people through law is basically the same as what goes on in the Middle East with certain segments of the population trying to put in place governments that will enforce sharia.  In addition to the sense of having some other belief structure forced upon you or others - which is actually against the Constitution to a certain degree - there is a real risk of the loss of scientific advancement.  That's what scares me the most.

There has been an uprising in what I've come to call "redneck culture":  extreme to the point of being unhealthy patriotism, blatant racism, intimidation, and demagoguery.  The people in this culture seem to vote Republican simply because that's what they've always done and that's what everyone else in their communities are doing.  In addition to the simple inertia, these communities appear to be driven to vote Republican mostly based on the social aspects of the GOP's platform, even though such positions have no direct impact on one's own life and instead really just affect the lives of others.  They vote based on these social planks despite Republican politicians' actions, which clearly demonstrate that they are in the pocket of the wealthy and corporate America. 

Of course, me just labeling it as redneck culture is kind of what this guy is talking about.  That said, it's not just a leftist thing.  People in these blood red communities are intimidated and shamed if they express that they are thinking about voting for one of the Democrats or Green party politicians.  I'm friends with a few Tea Party Republican supporters on Facebook, and you would not believe the lunacy they spout on there.  "I need Hillary Clinton like I need ebola!"  "Hillary Clinton is a frail lesbian"  "Crooked Hillary blah blah blah"  "Thanks, Obama!" (in response to some random crime committed by a black person).  Sometimes I do try to debate with them, but I'm usually jumped on by a hundred similarly minded folks who just do stuff like simply call me a "libtard", "pussy", and an "Obama lover".  This is not the stuff that builds a foundation of intelligent political discourse. 

Frankly, I blame the current divide in this country and the rise of the alt-right and redneck culture on outfits such as Fox News and Breitbart.  People that consume those news sources tend to do so unquestioningly and never seem to try fact-checking anything they see.  To any leftist that spends any amount of time watching, these outfits appear to be full of pure, unbridled propaganda.  Like Brexit: The Movie, but for American issues.  It seems impossible that people would actually buy into a lot of what's said on those outfits, but yet they do.  People complain that the "mainstream media"* is leftist.  I'd agree that a lot of journalists are indeed leftist and this comes out in the types of stories they cover and what is said.  That said, as leftist as - say - MSBNC is, Fox News is far, far more rightist.  It's created a serious malaise in this country.  The right doesn't compromise anymore, because if you do you're seen as weak and will get voted out in favor of someone even more extreme right wing, thanks to Fox News and the unintended effects of gerrymandering.  Anyone who holds any leftist position or compromises with the left is a "libtard pussy".

I wish I knew what the answer was.  I think reigning in Wall Street, large business consolidation, and business executive compensation could go a long, long way to helping this country as a whole, but I don't see it happening in the current political climate.  The interesting thing is that I think that's one area where many that voted for Donald Trump and many leftists would agree and there is a real opportunity to build some sort of coalition to force changes through.  Unfortunately, I don't think it will result in any useful coalition because the chasm between us is already so wide and deep.  That said, now that Donald Trump is elected based on such sentiment, I do suppose it behooves us on the left to rally some support behind him to see if he follows through on some of those promises, since they match our wishes as well. 

* I hate the "mainstream media" phase thrown around by the right.  There are statistics that show that Fox News viewership tops all the other major news networks (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, HLN).  Even Fox News themselves claims this.  Someone, please help me understand how a news network that has more viewers than any other isn't considered mainstream.

Quemaqua:
Well said.

And I do think we need to find ways to start listening to each other better, but I just don't see how it's going to happen. There are too many people in control of what people hear (and because so few have any ability to think critically anymore, they also control what most people think). I'm more liberal than conservative, especially on certain key issues, but it doesn't mean I don't understand why so many poor white Republicans are pissed off. I get it, and I agree that we have a corrupt government that isn't serving the people, and that corruption absolutely comes from both the right and the left. I don't think almost anyone disagrees with that.

The problem is that we all disagree on the solution, and voting in Donald Trump seems as idiotic to many of us—because he's more or less the poster child for the current problem (corporocratic government)—as it seems like the most sensible thing in the world to someone who looked at Clinton and saw just more of the same. Neither of those interpretations is strictly wrong. Both are limited in one facet or another. With careful analysis, I personally have come to conclude that Donald Trump is a nightmare, but that the primary difference between he and Clinton was really just accountability. She had more reason to listen to people and be accountable to her constituents, even though she's not a particularly decent human being and has a long track record of political corruption. But between the two, she was still a safer choice, because Donald Trump has literally no reason to listen to anyone except the corrupt people all of us want to stop controlling our government. And I think everyone who voted for him would discover that with some examination of things as his presidency wears on, but for the fact that so many are coming from this place where you never question your own ideology, you just defend it against everything, because no matter what the other side says it's coming from the mouth of the devil himself.

We've had a term for this for thousands of years. It's a logical fallacy called ad hominem, which I'm sure you've all heard of: an attack against the person making the argument, not a refutation of the argument itself. This is what I've watched my conservative family do over and over again lately. They also commonly commit the Straw Man fallacy, setting up a false representation of someone's argument and then refuting that instead. Frankly, the latter is becoming increasingly common on both sides, and it all comes down to the same desire to just label the other guy as evil and not truly consider the argument being made.

I have no idea how we get past this on a national level. Personally, I've come to believe that listening more and talking less are two of the most important things we can do, and to speak only when it's truly contributing something valuable to the conversation, but that's a much harder thing in practice than in principle, especially when you're facing issues like hate. Even when I do understand where people whose methods I don't agree with are coming from, I can't get them to understand that. Because unless I go along with their proposed solutions, they think I must not understand.

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