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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Maoism and Stalinism are fundamentally conservative reactions to perceived problems. They are statist, to be sure, but in principle they are just as repressive to individual liberty as unrestrained capitalism.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Previous page:
The way you're all discussing how the GOP is 'doomed' and 'their policies are fundamentally disliked by Americans' would make one think that Romney got less than 10 per cent of the popular vote yesterday.
Guys, the difference between Obama and Romney was two friggin percentage points. Fifty versus forty-eight. That's almost a tie in terms of the popular vote. Not exactly grounds to talk about how 'doomed' the Republicans are and how 'America's screaming for their blood'.
edited 7th Nov '12 12:47:50 PM by MidnightRambler
Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...
Yes., thats true. But electorally speaking it wasnt even a close race.
And this isnt like its a one off trend.
Poll numbers show that minorities/Youth are rising in how much they matter every election. And the republicans even admit themselves they have huge problems connecting to those groups.
edited 7th Nov '12 12:48:43 PM by Midgetsnowman
Well see there's your problem, Fighteer was talking about the GOP not "the Right". "The Right" is often a definition relative to the country with many other implication. One can use "the Right" to refer to a particular set of political priorities but then that has nothing to do with the purpose of Congress or the White House. The point of them is to represent the political priorities of the people and it doesn't matter if there is a sense of the right or the left or if there is what the particular political priorities are. You pulled a non sequitor there.
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Yes, but everyone ITT seems to assume that there's some kind of huge anti-Republican sentiment among voters. If that were true, you'd see it reflected in the popular vote, not just in the number of electors.
edited 7th Nov '12 12:51:13 PM by MidnightRambler
Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...@Midget: Perhaps, and I hope that is true, but I can't quite bring myself to believe that it is.
@Fighteer: Even pure Marxism is a conservative version of socialism. It wasn't really trusting of change or people's ability to change, hence how it didn't trust people with democracy, initially, having a dictator to adjust them to it, which is a hallmark of traditional conservatism. One of the key aspects of it is a just war, which is a very conservative concept, and it defines history as an eternal struggle between the classes, again not very liberal.
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Well the elections don't really come down to the big numbers or sweeping masses. Everything gets analysed in terms of specific regions, demographics and tendencies and it comes down to a few well studied areas in which the trends go against the Republicans.
edited 7th Nov '12 12:56:00 PM by SomeSortOfTroper
Republicans need to get with the program in order to offer a meaningful alternative to Democrats. Going more Right isn't the answer. Going more centrist might be, but then the two parties would only differ on details and perhaps overarching policy goals.
If they don't, we'll be left with what amounts to a single-party system, as they will have self-marginalized themselves into being pretty much worthless (except for amusing fodder for the Colbert Report).
I'd also like it if the Right-wing nutjobs would grow a brain or something. They end up supressing the right-center people.
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.![]()
Then apparently 48 per cent of your country consists of male WASPs...?
On another note, I kinda liked Obama's victory speech. Sure, it had a lot of jingoistic bullcrap about how the USA is 'the greatest country on earth' and cheesy Fauxlosophic Narration about 'hope', 'progress', 'dreams', etc., but that's all par for the course in American politics. At least it wasn't as bad as in his inaugural speech back in 2008.
I liked the part where he said that 'no one who fights for his country will have to fight for a job or a roof over his head when he gets back'; it was a nicely devised piece of rhetoric, and made a good point in a crystal clear way. It's also good that he explicitly mentioned 'gay or straight' in his Long List of 'whether you're X or Y'. Oh, and of course 'We Take Care Of Our Own' blasting out of the PA at the end... awesome! The Boss's music was just made for epic moments like this.
edited 7th Nov '12 1:12:06 PM by MidnightRambler
Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...I didn't say that every race/gender voted 100% in lockstep. -_-
I was making an observation about the far future, one that even Mike Huckabee and other Republicans seem to agree with me on.
I'd hardly call him a liberal shill.
edited 7th Nov '12 1:19:43 PM by HilarityEnsues
Careful here,remember what happened with 2004-2008? It looked just like this except flipped,and the crazy left(not the sane left) were being the fatheads. And what happened in the mid-terms? They took back control,and then what happened in '08,landslide for the Dems
We can't get to cozy,because if 2004 is anything to go by,2014 is the year the GOP takes the Senate back,and '16 will be the '08 election flipped.
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Then stop making sweeping generalisations like 'the male WASP vote'.
@Trivialis: I'm not sure that there is a realistic situation in which unrestrained social liberty leads to repression without no longer being social liberty. You can easily postulate a case where, for example, anti-discrimination laws go so far as to create a situation of reverse discrimination, empowering the formerly oppressed group past the point where it's necessary, but that's not liberalism anymore, that's just oppression under a different master.
There's also the "voting yourself bread and circuses" problem: the classic situation where a democracy discovers that it can vote for stuff it likes and not vote for stuff it doesn't like until the system collapses. That's where conservatism is entirely valid and appropriate: you need a brake on the enthusiasm of the voters to stop a runaway positive feedback loop.
The problem with today's Republican brand of conservatism is that it is anything but conservative in the classic sense. It seeks to control the economic machine with positive feedback: make booms higher and busts deeper out of a misguided belief in "natural business cycles", the end result of which is to funnel ever greater wealth to the top. Keynesian economics is really the conservative mindset here, seeking to dampen the cycles to ensure a smooth ride for everyone.
On social issues, the GOP has moved beyond conservatism and into sheer pigheaded stubbornness, and in doing so they've apparently abandoned the notion of the United States as a land of opportunity, welcoming to immigrants, with freedom and justice for all.
@Midnight Rambler: As discussed, the vote may have been close, but you may recall how all the common wisdom said that, given the current economic situation, a Republican victory should have been guaranteed. The fact that it wasn't, that Romney did not coast to victory, speaks of critical communication problems between the GOP and the general body of voters. It's hard to argue, had the economy been booming and all other factors remained the same, that Obama would have faced any challenge whatsoever.
edited 7th Nov '12 1:39:41 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yes, liberalizing from Maoism is socially left, but it's still not a free enough country. Economically it's right. In this sense, "conservative" really means remaining communist or corporatist, whichever China is right now. It does not mean right-wing.
I'm noting this because while we can talk about flaws of American right, I disagree that as a theoretical position things will only go from right to left.