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The wealthy want us to fight a culture war to distract us from the class war we should be having.
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The rich waged wars on democracy since the beginning of European colonization in North America. They’ve been winning steadily, with few losses since the beginning of money in society.
In any war the only winner is the rich. If the rich lose, then it’s called a revolution instead.
It was the bourgeois that win in France, not the peasants.
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No, the Revolution got rid of the monarchy and neutered the clergy and nobility, but it was an urban revolution of the Parisian middle class, or bourgeoisie. The situation of the peasants changed little through the revolution, and it was persistent efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose Parisian culture on the countryside. It took until WW1 to construct a coherent French nation. Weber (not that Weber) showed that in Peasants into Frenchmen in the 70s.
And Napoleon had family connections in the Italian nobility. His uncle was a cardinal. His father was a lawyer and inherited a fair chunk of change. Napoleon was hardly any sort of peasant.
I think most revolutions just lead to a new ruling class that is just as bad as the old. It didn’t take Stalin long to become just as bad as the Czar. After fighting a war to stop taxation from Britain, one of the first things Washington did was put down a rebellion to enforce a federal tax on whiskey.
The thing is the American revolution wasn’t about taxation itself. The taxation without representation bit was more of a minor component over how society should be organized. The question was whether the inherited aristocratic titles or ownership of land(later means of production) determined your social power. There’s nothing about the ideology of the American revolution that is about the levying of taxes, it is about who gets to collect them.
With the soviets, the problems and successes are significantly more nuanced than “Stalin was bad dictator”(although that is a true statement). Which on one hand makes a lot of western criticism of the USSR questionably true, but also makes the actual issues(which there were) harder to address because they happened not because of one guy being bad.
Taxation was the main reason for the war. Britain had levied some new taxes to recoup the cost of the French and Indian war. It put a significant strain on the economy.
Democracy is good for the oligarchs. Trump is a populist. The oligarchs definitely don’t like him. Even the Koch family is against him.
You’re being down voted, but you’re correct.
When one group became openly hostile to multiple populations of people based on things like race and sexuality, it’s no longer ‘voting with your feet’, it becomes ‘go somewhere they’re not gonna shoot my son’
Yeah this article was interesting, but absolutely drenched in both-sides-ism. “I wanna be able to fly a thin blue line flag” doesn’t compare with “I’m LGBTQ and fleeing for my life.”
Thin blue line flags and safe places for trans people can not coexist.
It would be cool if democrats focused more on working class people, rather than just saying they do. That’s literally all they need to do to win back millions of voters.
I totally get your sentiment here, but don’t they do this by (at minimum at least) the legislation that they try to put in place? Student Loan forgiveness. Expanding educational opportunities. Access to healthcare. Providing more sustainable and green energy sources. Better pay and protections for working Americans. These initiatives constantly get shot down by the other side, and then people blame Democrats for not forcing it through. As long as we have one side actively torpedoing the other’s efforts, we can’t put the blame on the people trying to do something. Just my two cents though. Plus you have the uneducated people that align with conservatives that think they are the recipients of their platform’s initiatives, when it really goes to the top 1%. So they stay in power to continue the grift.
These initiatives constantly get shot down by the other side, and then people blame Democrats for not forcing it through.
I blame the Democrats for consistently finding just enough no votes when we give them a majority.
You don’t need a college degree to work in the trades. This is a point of contention because I’ve heard people say many times they don’t want their tax dollars going towards someone’s liberal arts degree. I’m a wastewater operator. I have a degree but allot of the people I work with don’t.
I agree - we need a much higher focus on trades. My education angle wasn’t towards post graduate though. My wife is an elementary school teacher and teachers are underfunded, continually having their curriculum watered down, and we are seeing across the board privatization of education and erosion of the foundation of education itself. That’s diminishing access to education.
Is the majority people liberal on Lemmy?
Yes. By the looks of it, this place is a echo chamber. Sadly.
The reason for this is due to the Reddit exodus. All of the r/politics users moved to c/politics.
Idk what that word means.
Not many do. I’m not sure if you are making a point about Orwellian word destruction or you just literally don’t know haha.
It’s sad how we can’t just talk, and always segregating themselves.
“People want to live where they know their neighbors don’t want to wipe them from the face of the earth. More at 11.”
Exemplified by the fact that we have started having free states again like during the civil war. The Maryland governor has been very clear and direct that the state of Maryland will take in political and social refugees from Florida and Texas. Where transpeople are being forced to die or pretend not to exist in Florida, Maryland is codifying their right to be and live as who they are.
You can’t blame lefties and progressives for wanting to escape to freedom when their other option is death or hiding.
Both sides?
My generally open minded historically liberal friend called me the other day.
He moved to a very conservative area a few years ago, and the other night in a phone call he was saying “I’d feel far safer being a liberal at a Trump rally than wearing a Trump hat at a BLM antifa rally”.
It is very much perceived on the right that the left is a violent mob waiting to burn down your neighborhood at the smallest slight. While the right is a bunch of friendly Sunday school help thy neighbor types.
I tend to lean towards this is all bot farm propaganda trolling, and that only a very small percentage of either side are actually bad people I would want to avoid.
The problem is, this is how people are getting their information now days, and the idea that “Oh that’s just people on the internet” is no longer valid. Social media and algorithmic rage bait driven content are having a very real impact on the “real” world.
Since he is an old friend, I was able to get him to pause for a breath in this talking point fueled screed he was on, and point out “Dude, I just want the same simple things you do, abortion access, religion out of schools and politics, reasonable gun ownership, healthy air/food/water, a strong national defense, etc”.
When one of the first arguments you bring up is the “violance” of drag people reading books to kids, well shit, I just don’t think we’re having the same conversation.
liberal at a Trump rally than wearing a Trump hat at a BLM antifa rally
So in the discussion of red states vs blue states, the ‘both sides’ examples are:
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Trump, a member of the republican party (Red) who rose to presidency as the republican candidate, still has many followers and is part of the republican mainstream
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BLM antifa, fringe movements which have no official part in the democratic party (Blue) and have never held any political power
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I’m sure both sides are actually doing this. It’s just that only one side is actually being persecuted and forced to leave their homes.
There is a real threat of harm to various minority groups living in red states. Hell, there’s a real threat of harm to women who can fall pregnant living in red states. I’d certainly not want to live there if my accidentally falling pregnant (which would likely be ectopic in my case) would result in a very high chance of my death.
Conservative terrorism is out control. It breaks out specifically across racial and socioeconomic lines.
Moderates and liberals are trying to protect themselves, while conservatives are hell-bent on tearing everyone down.
My hope is that these are the death throes of the Republican party. A loud gasp for air before the party croaks and shatters.
An important point, liberals are moderates. Or rather, centrists.
That’s why I no longer call myself a liberal. Socialist as fuck, baby!
Damn right
I wish democrats would make moving to places like Montana, the Dakotas and Wyoming a priority
Why would we want to live in a shithole state like that?
If you bring enough people with you, it wouldn’t be a shithole state.
You’d have to bring a whole city. What I’d be losing moving from D.C. to Wyoming is not fixable by bringing a few friends. Museums? Enough population that shows and bands play there regularly?
Also, who can actually convince friends and family to move themselves across the country to a shithole for politics? Have you done that?
The idea is to move there in enough numbers to overwhelm the GOP majority and make the state not be a shithole anymore.
Yeah, it’s hard enough to get blue voters to stay in those red shitholes. Why would any sane person who already lives in a blue state want to move to a red one?
Who’s going to give up their entire quality of life to be a small snowflake hoping to make an avalanche? For the politics, it’s a very small contribution. But for the family, it’s huge. You’d be losing job prospects, friends and family, activity availability, local politics, healthcare quality and access, and most importantly: being treated like a person if you aren’t a right-wing cishet white male of means.
Almost no one’s going to take that trade and they shouldn’t.
I think more Democrats moving to swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina would be higher priority if people are free to move wherever purely based on political reasons.
It’s such a weird time in the U.S… Also, it might be a better choice to go to a battleground state.
That’s what I did. Moved to AZ, which is a purple state, from CA. I joined a writing group here, and one member is an out gay conservative. No way could he have been that outspoken in a casual writing group in CA, he’d have been chased out.
As someone more on the liberal side of things in general, it’s incredibly refreshing to be able to hold a good-natured conversation with him involved where he didn’t feel worry or concern about discussing his ideas.
We have another lady in the group who writes hardcore far-left poetry, and those are always followed up by great conversations. She’s nice and not condescending to the conservative guy.
I love being in a purple state, I wish more states were battleground states.
I live in a purple state in a rural area, and I HATE it. Not because there are conservatives, but because massive numbers of these conservatives are trembling with fear of the other and if they think that I am on their “side” for whatever reason, they won’t hesitate to say the most ignorant, racist, bigoted shit about “those people” - essentially anyone who isn’t straight and white, while demanding prayer of the exclusively evangelical variety in public meetings. Their world view is so insular that it’s suffocating to be around.
Interesting. I don’t live in a rural area, so maybe that’s why I’m experiencing more of a balance. No one here that I know who are conservative say any of that stuff, and they didn’t say it around me before they knew my political leanings, either.
I joined a writing group here, and one member is an out gay conservative.
I find it unreal that an LGBTQ person would actually even consider the current Republican Party as a viable option.
How many of them do you talk to though? They certainly exsist, so seeking one out to talk about their experiences and views with might help you understand where they come from, even if you disagree with them.
I know a lot of people in the LGBTQ community. I have yet to meet someone who would vote for a Republican. But I’ll certainly ask about it if I ever meet one.
I’m not surprised. Since the LGBTQ community is fairly political, they’re not very accepting of LGBTQ people who don’t align with them politically. There are lots of LGBTQ people who don’t want to be part of the community because of how rigid it is in that regard.
These are what the LGBT people that I’ve met has said specifically.
Other than that, it’s likely that there are some who lean conservative but don’t speak up about it for fear of being shunned by the community.
The LGBTQ community is being assailed by the GOP at the moment. Literal physical threats. Whatever was left of support for the GOP from that community is quickly dissipating.
I don’t know if you’ve misunderstood, but I’m not a conservative, I just enjoy having political discussions with them, especially when they seem to be a contradiction in today’s world of party-line politics.
Oklahoma here and am ready to get the fuck out
Funny, I just moved to Oklahoma from Seattle and it’s been a nice change of pace.
But why are all the blue states cold?
My husband and I thought about Arizona, or Virginia to get away from one of the highest CoL areas in the country… but eventually decided to focus on Connecticut instead, because we don’t want to be in a red state. With the exception of CA, none of the liberal states are sunny and all of them are expensive!
Because all of the red people are retirement age… 😂
Because warm states were better for a slave-based agriculture economy and the liberal/conservative divide (whose relationship to political parties has changed over time) comes, in large part, from cultural differences that emerged before the Civil War.
That’s dark, but it makes sense.
It’s likely also due to the populations living in southern states, another big part of the population in southern states are those who had jobs in the mining industries or people retiring, the biggest things the republicans are pushing are bringing back mining and making sure that people get to keep their money(such as lower taxes) where as democrats are pushing for a cleaner environment(so miners blame them for losing their jobs), and major infrastructure plans that could take a while to pan out(so people retired see that and don’t want higher taxes as they already got their grain and don’t want to pass it on).
This is an over generalization and there is other major factors but these two groups are significant sections that the republicans are appealing to where as democrats aren’t such. Democrats might be able to get big wins if they could campaign on programs to help mine works get new jobs and revitalize the economies in mine towns and maybe some more programs for people that have retired so they feel they are getting more then what they’re putting in.
Eh, they are becoming so extreme that they are leaving some of their voters behind. They were supposed to win the house in a landslide and they barely hung on. They are losing special elections because their candidates are too extreme. Even the Supreme Court can’t stomach some of their gerrymandering on race. I don’t buy this.
This. The GOP has lost something like 12 out of their last 10 special elections. If demographics have their way, there is a decent chance the GOP won’t even be a national party by 2028.
This is part of the GOP strategy.
Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri has openly acknowledged that the GOP strategy is to make it so miserable for Democrats in red and purple states that they will move to blue states. That would, in turn, cement Republican power in the White House, Senate and thereby the Supreme Court.
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This is only a viable strategy as long as the electoral college exists.
It’s not going away.
This argument needs to die. The EC is never going away, so stop pinning various strategies and hopes on it somehow magically disappearing. If people spent 1/2 as much time on actually voting and campaigning for center and left candidates as they do complaining about the EC, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today.
I have worked on campaigns and studied politics for years. With the EC, the current SCOTUS, and the voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics of the last few decades , there is no reasonable long-term path to left, or even center, power. People are allowed to complain. People have been organizing, for years. Nothing has worked, and basic human rights are now being violated in ways and for groups that they hadn’t been before. You’re right that with our current governmental structure, the EC isn’t going anywhere. But democracy’s not about elections alone; it’s about the consent of the governed. A whole lot of us don’t consent, and I don’t think the current institutional infrastructure’s going to survive the blast when that pressure gets too high. And if anything (other than a Constitutional Convention based on the same principles as the EC) happens to the current arrangement, the EC goes too. No one in an underrepresented state would willingly accept those conditions.
HALF the population can’t be bothered to vote in most elections. The country is being dragged to the Right and has been for years now and election after election a massive percent of the population doesn’t seem it is worth going out to the polls. In presidential elections it is higher, but still - there are a LOT and I mean a LOT of elections that could have swung the other way if only a few hundred more people got off their butts and voted. We could have gotten rid of that blowhard Lauren Boebart (however it is spelled) last cycle. She won by only a few hundred votes in an election where less than 60% of the population of that district voted. Apparently Colorado is a mail-in state, so these people didn’t even have to go drive anywhere.
The situation is even worse if you look at demographics. No one had more to lose than the youth of this country and their voting numbers are pitiful. What’s worse is that they have the numbers to change elections. They are a massive group that at this point in time have more people than the dreaded Boomers. Yet their numbers are abysmal.
So when I hear about people complaining about the EC or gerrymandering or a host of other roadblocked set up by the Right for them to get their way on election day, I just think back that these are mostly just excuses. I am not saying that gerrymandering isn’t real - it absolutely is - but even some of the most gerrymandered districts could swing the other way if enough people voted.
If you’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the threat the right poses, and you see structural change is impossible, I sympathize. But blaming people who are struggling for not doing something they see as unlikely to produce positive change and that the state is simultaneously actively making it hard for them to do isn’t helpful. I’ve been politically involved since 2000 (academic study, campaign volunteering/work); Barring major disaster, I’m not seeing voter numbers going up from here significantly without legistative changes. You can yell at clouds all you want, but that’s not the point of leverage you’re looking for.
Making everyone a victim who is on some pre-determined path and they have no control over the things that happen to them is exactly the nonsense that I see the youth are falling for. I see posts by Zoomers all the time that essentially boil down to “we’re screwed, so fuck it” or “I give up” or some such. That’s not the America that I grew up in and I refuse to buy into this idea that change is impossible. Americans need “tough love” - coddling them in this idea of “IF ONLY so-and-so was different” then we could fix the environment/housing crisis/healthcare. Be the change you want to be. Expecting that it will simply be handled to you leads to this apathy and tuning-out that far too many Americans already fall into.
I don’t think you understand. No one in my position thinks things will he handed to/handled for us. (Your word choice is unclear.). I think we’re on the Titanic and we’ve struck the iceberg, we just haven’t done the horrible dying in the North Atlantic part. And if I wanted boomers who’ve probably studied our political structure less closely, spent less time doing actual campaign work, and seen less of the way things work than I have, telling me I’m entitled, I’d have asked one of those guys who likes talking about millennials like we’re children whose biggest problem is not laying off the avocado toast. “Kids today are weak, entitled whiners playing the victim card, and I know better because I’m older” may pass for discourse some places, but not here.
It won’t work for long, since they’re making people so poor they can’t afford to move.
For real. I live in Texas currently. If I could afford it, I would move tomorrow. This place is Hell, in every sense.
Me too. I’m a clinical social worker here, and so many of my LGBTQ+ patients have been struggling with suicidal ideation with the politics here, especially with the most recent legislative session. I’m gonna stay here as long as possible and vote in every fucking election possible. Lately I’ve even been voting in the Republican primaries against the extremist candidates. It’s so sad, because it wasn’t this bad here when I was growing up in the 90s. We even had a Dem governor.
LGBTQ+ patients have been struggling with suicidal ideation with the politics here
This is exactly what Abbott wants. Makes me want to plant more trees.
How “Christian” of him, eh? It’s disgusting. We are human souls who deserve safety and to not live in fear. I have hope that many Gen Z Texans feel disgusted as well, won’t move, and can turn Texas blue. Once more and more are able to vote, we can transform this state. Maybe that is too idealistic, but it keeps me sane while I am unable to move.
It makes me sad that leftists are leaving Florida. They are turning a purple state into a red one. Every sane person that leaves Florida means the ratio gets tilted more and more into the looneys.
People need to stay in red states. Voting blue in Colorado isn’t going to do anything
I agree with you in a macro sense, but individually it takes a lot of courage and sacrifice and I’m not sure I’d expect that of anyone. Something systematic has to change.
Blue states don’t give an egg.
Red states “where you from, and why are you here? Don’t take my water”.
At least that was last time I visited the Midwest in my own vehicle (but they can’t spot rentals very well, treated me like their kin when I didn’t have California plates and hid my accent as much as possible)
What Midwestern state was that? A lot of folks don’t realize that, outside of big cities and their respective suburbs, most of the Midwest is indistinguishable from the deep south.
