To be honest, I kind of went the other way. I saw what republicans are really about and noped my way out. I used to believe them when they said they were USA first, bring the jobs back to America, stand up to foreign dictators, small government, etc... But the past 10 years have put a lie to their posturing on nearly every front. January 6th was a turning point for me, all of a sudden there was a chance that we were going to have a president sitting in office despite the end of his term. A man willing to start a civil war rather than concede a valid election.
The Republican I really respect at this point is Mike Pence. I used to think he was a theocrat idiot with mush for brains. But now I realize he's all that AND a brave and honest man who actually gives two shits about democracy.
Precisely why the two-party system is such an abomination. It boils down ALL politics to a binary system -- are you red, or are you blue? Both you and the previous commenter have completely valid reasoning for switching parties, based on separate issues. But the only method of communication with our democracy requires that you pick one of two awful choices. Sure, you could vote independent -- with the basket of issues that come with opting out of the two majority parties -- and primaries let you cut some of the least-aligned folks in your party from the ballot.
It's kind of like going to a restaurant and being forced to pick raw vs. burned beef, and there's a ton of different sides that come with each option that are nonconfigurable. And then critics constantly debate "raw vs. burned" in polls, and try to gain insight from that on whether people really prefer corn or salad or biscuits. But in reality there's just too much noise to generate any signal.
I feel like Adam Kinzinger talks a similar talk to you, if you're looking for more republicans you can respect (I'm not affiliated in any way, just came across him via twitter)
I can empathize, but my point was in regards to the accusation of being a “conservative” by just coming down in the other direction on the lesser-of-two evils calculus. Sane Americans are struggling with the fact that there are good arguments to be made that both political parties in the US presently present meaningful existential risk. There are several methods one could argue in how to tie break, purely in the interest in minimizing the risk of collapse, tyrannical overtake, or the development of a police state. From example, you may vote against the ruling class broadly, which is left-aligned, if you feel that the broader ruling class has power superiority over the narrow set of elected leaders at a given time. Under that framework, no tyrant can successfully seize power unless they are aligned with the ruling class.
There never really was a chance of that. There was nothing Trump could of done that day to make that happen. Even if the process would of been disrupted, it wouldn't of caused that.
Say that Mike Pence was killed on Jan. 6th before he could certify the election. Now you have an election with no result which leads to the first succession crisis since the post-civil war era with Hayes. Trump appoints a new Vice President which says that he won and refuses to certify the election. When the senate almost certainly gets bogged down trying to elect a new president we are stuck. Now what? Does Trump remain president? It wasn't even a close election, so they can't manipulate the votes any further in his favor.
At that point we have a ticking time bomb. At the end of his term is Trump still the president? Or are we a country without a president? When that happens, if Trump stays in the White House and acts like a president, what then? Would the republican filled Supreme Court back his play? Would the military follow him? Who would oppose him? Would the secret service still protect him? What happens if some states recognize him as president, but others do not?
That's a lot of what ifs. While technically possible, none seem plausible. Many of those things could of happened outside of the riots as well (Pence dies). It's kind of pointless speculation. I don't think Pence had a serious chance of being killed that day, even if they did get in close proximity. That's just my opinion.
Where has the left gone off the deep end other than in Tucker's lunatic and manipulative ravings? Please give us concrete examples, yes woke politics might have gone overboard for many's tastes but where has that had any real impact on day to day life? In the mean time the right has gone full throttle on an anti-democracy cult following of a single person's unproven and clearly false claims of election fraud, and taken the country on a very dark path that is in direct opposition to our constitution, the rule of law and our way of life.
Look at any time series on polling regarding political hatred - the left has been largely ineffectual at enacting crazy policy, but the demonization and willingness to punish people for views that are well within the Overton window of public opinion has increased dramatically in recent years, eg. adopting and defending the views of Barack Obama on gay marriage in 2012 will lead to your swiftly being deplatformed from Twitter, Reddit, etc. This impacts my day to day life in the sense that I am no longer able to express many reasonable, non-hateful views in many parts of the internet being censored and putting my livelihood at risk. If you think that this isn't really an impediment that I should care about, then I don't see how you could lament these SpaceX employees being unable to publicly excoriate their bosses without consequence.
For many of us, seeing what happened to people like James Damore was a turning point that something had deeply changed in the political culture.
So one issue I see here is that you are against gay marriage?
This isn't "the left" it's "the US" that had a change of view. The poll numbers are through the roof. And when it's such a personal thing with the very families that are our friends, it's not hard to see why gay marriage is so popular. That you feel "hated" by others for rejecting their friends families is a weird way to put it.
Obama was a centrist for his time, and often times after society opens up to more people it's hard to go back to closing it off to our new members.
As for James Damore, somebody disparaging their colleagues, publicly, and not even their leader for specific actions, but an entire gender, based on bad reading of biology... do you have similar sympathy for the people fired here, or it only when somebody is expressing beliefs that are hurtful to those not at the top?
Gay marriage was a major shift in culture, but bad sexism has been out of vogue for decades, even if overall sexism hasn't decreased a huge amount.
I have all sorts of politically unacceptable views that I don't share. But I don't play the victim for being "hated" just because I don't get my way.
I'm not against gay marriage. I'm using it as an example.
But you're really illustrating my point here, by arguing not that there hasn't been a shift but that the growing hatred and intolerance is in fact a good thing. I feel like this is a more honest position than pretending that prevailing attitudes haven't shifted.
As a personal example, last week I had a comment deleted on Reddit for being "hatred" because I described drag as a form of kink. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but this kind of banal censorship has become a regular experience for anyone who offers any sort of resistance to woke narratives. If you think this is a good change, then I disagree but at least acknowledging that there's been a change puts us in the same reality.
I've had comments incorrectly deleted in Reddit but I didn't think of it as political persecution.
Same on Twitter. A lot.
And if it were political persecution, which it very well could be, Reddit is moderated by absolute randoms from the internet. Starting new subreddits and moderating to one's one preferences is very literal free speech.
>I've had comments incorrectly deleted in Reddit but I didn't think of it as political persecution.
Please. We know that this isn't considered as "incorrect" by the people doing the deleting, and that a well-reasoned appeal would be productive. This isn't happening due to simple randomness, as basically anyone who pushes back against woke narratives will attest - for example, openly endorsing JK Rowling's views on gender will get you banned from most of Reddit and quite possibly fired from your job if you do it under your real name on Twitter. This wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.
Again, you're free to say that this is a good change, or just wave all this concerns away with pithy slogans like "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", but I'm just trying to establish that there's been a shift on the left and it seems like you don't disagree with this.
This has been my experience too, and it's very frustrating for those of us who have long held left-wing beliefs but are skeptical of these recent social trends. The obsessive focus on identity issues almost seems like a deliberate distraction from the larger societal concerns regarding the cost of living, housing, employment rights, environmental catastrophe, and similar.
I feel that social media companies are largely to blame here, with the impact of their efforts to increase engagement metrics at the expense of users' wellbeing. We all have a perpetually-available outrage machine in our pockets these days, encouraging us all to react with emotion rather than be considered and thoughtful.
Regarding your example of gender views, the other reason why this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago is that hardly anyone believed that stuff. JK Rowling's opinions would have been met with a shrug. But there has since been a concerted effort to capture the minds of the younger generations at an age where they're unlikely to see the inherent contradictions in this ideology.
> And when it's such a personal thing with the very families that are our friends, it's not hard to see why gay marriage is so popular. That you feel "hated" by others for rejecting their friends families is a weird way to put it.
I voted "Yes" in Australia's 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite, and if they repeated the plebiscite again today, I'd still vote the same way. And yet, I feel like there is a problem here. It is a complex question, and I don't think it necessarily has a simple answer, but a lot of people treat it as a simple binary "Yes"-vs-"No", with only one answer to that binary being socially acceptable. And even in pointing that out publicly, I feel a certain degree of anxiety – should I? I don't think it is all in my (admittedly rather prone to anxiety anyway) head, there are external cultural forces contributing to it, and I think it is fair to question those forces.
To give just one example of the many complexities I see: I compare my own country of Australia to the US, and although both arrived at roughly the same destination (legal same-sex marriage nationwide), they arrived at it by very different routes. In Australia, federal legislation, in-principle pre-approved by the voters in a (non-legally-binding) nationwide plebiscite – as such not constitutionally entrenched, but anything approved in a nation-wide plebiscite (even a non-legally-binding one), is politically impossible to repeal without having another plebiscite to approve that repeal. And it was mostly a symbolic measure, since (nationwide) Australian law already gave unmarried couples in long-term relationships (de facto relationships as we call them), whether opposite-sex or same-sex, 99.9% of the rights of legally married couples. (I won't deny the missing 0.1% causes real practical problems for some people, but that is the experience of a relatively small minority, and there is no reason in principle why those problems could not be solved with further legal or bureaucratic reforms).
In the US, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision (Obergefell v. Hodges), based on highly contested principles of constitutional interpretation, which the current Supreme Court majority does not share – and, given they are likely to soon overturn a famous decision based on a similar style of legal reasoning (Roe v. Wade), you have to wonder how long Obergefell will last. The whole situation seems to support the idea that social reforms are better achieved through the democratic process than through the fickleness of judicial decisions–a viewpoint which in the US is often labelled as "conservative" or "right-wing", but not so in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, what in the US is seen as "conservative jurisprudence", in many other countries (Australia included) is just the mainstream consensus approach to constitutional law, to which few would attach political labels such as "conservative".
And, at the same time, that has happened against the background that unmarried couples (whether same-sex or opposite-sex) in the US still lack most of the legal rights and protections granted the legally married–an unfairness which few in the US seem to care much about, even on the Left–and which made the legalisation of same-sex marriage a change of far greater practical consequence in the US than it was in Australia. Couldn't this issue have been used as a vehicle to try to address that unfairness? Well, I think it could have, but my impression is that most marriage equality activists in the US didn't want to try, because they saw it as a distraction from their ultimate goal. A squandered opportunity?
I don't think it is unreasonable for a person to look at the two situations, and think the way the US has gone about addressing this issue leaves much to be desired, when compared to what certain other countries have done–I'm sure Australia is not the only country which has arguably done better than the US has–and those deficiencies in the way in which the reform was achieved in the US are a potential threat to its long-term durability there. But, that kind of nuanced conversation is rather alien to the "either-you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us" attitude to this topic which many people seem to have.
I hate to dove into another country politics on the open internet. But I’ll bite as simile things are happening in canada which ended up with Ontario conservatives dominating the provincial election.
The left needs to pay attention to every day issues. It’s not that the right has answers but they have acknowledged these issues as being the main issues. For instance, it should be absolutely not shocking to anyone that inflation has happened and is a direct result of our fiscal policies. Well, some did not seem to be concerned about printing money to buy bonds to fund record deficits which actually paid people and companies to reduce productivity and output. Surprise! School closures are another huge issue. Most of us with children saw the massive harms from keeping them home. It was absolutely devastating! I could go on. The left NDP party of Ontario admitted they focused too much on the chatter-class (Reddit, Twitter, journalists, etc) and not the working class
Except that it's a flawed democracy in that you only seem to have two choices, with people often choosing the lesser evil, or deciding not to vote anyway because it doesn't matter.
"the left" and "the right", or "the democrats" and "the republicans" in essence, is too wide a net. "The left go off the deep end" is also, when you look into it, a fairly small percentage of the wider population.
But it feels like people are pushed to the fringes, because the Other Side is being pushed to the fringes. There's just, from the perspective of an outsider, a lot of antagonism between the two "sides".
And that antagonism is being fueled by someone. There's people with a lot of money and / or special interests who benefit off of the infighting and polarisation.
For a broad range of voter preference classes, two-party systems are an expected result of majority voting. It's the best way to get the issues you care most about handled while hopefully not inflicting too much harm in all the other less important points that also get brought in. To fix that you need to change people's relative preferences or adopt an alternative voting scheme.
Politicians have no accountability. In 2024 Biden will take zero responsibility for inflation and the economy and spend all his time talking about how Republicans are racist.
And Republicans will take zero responsibility for Trump and Jan 6th and spend all their time talking about how Democrats want to force your children to be trans.
In the end no one has any responsibility to do anything to actually make the country better. If Musk could start a moderate party that took responsibility for results I would be on board.
No party is going to solve the problems the US chooses to occupy itself with currently. They are too complex. The right move is to just pick simpler problems.
There is an upper limit to what level of complexity any group can handle.
But Americans have been told the upper limit doesn't exist so often and for so long that they are learning the hard way where the limit lies.
I'm not American, and definetely not an expert on your politics, but like many other digital native Europeans hold pretty strong opinions on them anyway. I would honestly like to learn what in your opinion the actions of the Democrats are that lead to you sliding into second tier. From my perspective most of the blame would have to be put on Republicans.
It's not quite that easy, to be honest. And here's where I lose my audience...
We have two very pro corporate parties, that are pro military, one who is right and one who is center right, if you look at actual policy and spending. The main difference is on abortion legislation, gay rights, gun legislation (sort of... and that depends on the Democrat), and to an even lesser extent some tax policies, but with political funding how it is, no parties really bite the hand that feed them so 95% of tax policy is talk and "trickle down economic policy" is entrenched, much to the detriment of our country.
Most of the substantial difference is talking points and bluster, it pains me to say. Even gay rights is pretty new to the table... that didn't come about until Hillary Clinton ran against Trump, when she finally changed her position on gay marriage (though I think she was one of the last major hold outs).
The major problem with our American system of politics is the two party stranglehold that has been imposed upon and that those two parties have made nearly impossible to rid ourselves of. It's one of the things (other than war profiteering and insider trading) they vehemently agree on.
Thanks for the reply! Regarding corporate lobbying there seems to be a small relatively powerless group within the Democrats that are strongly against it, and I guess parts of the so-called alt-right fall into this category, too, but I agree that the core of both parties is strongly pro-corporate in a way that is anti-democratic. I'm re-reading a great book currently called "Why nations Fail", and looking at the US through their lense is super interesting.
The main thesis of the book is that the success or failure of nations is predicated on institutions working in a predictable way and guruanteeing broad and equal access to these institutions and the economy at large. The US was better than other countries at this for most of its existence (despite the horrible "exclusion" of non-whites and women). Today, the US seems to be slipping, and while I do agree that the Democrats aren't innocent on this either, and things like insider trading, corporate lobbying and political nepotism apply strongly to both parties, the Republicans always seem to be a bit worse (or have worse marketing).
Only having two choices in party certainly makes this way worse, but there's also the constant challenging of political norms that I would think mostly comes from the Republican side. (Although Obama was the first president to largely rule by EO, which itself is a pretty major breach of convention, and an attack on the democratic instituions)
I’ve disconnected myself from the contemporary political back and forth, but my outsider take is that it rather seems like the US left has… mostly accomplished little? What sweeping changes or policy platforms have them ‘off the deep end’?
They don’t have an answer because the modern democrats are the basically republicans of the 90s leaving the GOP with only a lot of complaining and projection as well as anti government theater.
It’s sort of a joke but it’s more sad. I used to vote Republican and I would again if anyone there was even half willing to be more considerate and rational.
Just so we’re clear, you replied to this person 10 min after their comment posted. You’ve already passed judgment before giving the OP a chance to respond. Discussions here happen over days not minutes. This isn’t a telegram chat. Your comment is in incredibly poor taste.
This is largely true. The US’s political left gained a ton of traction behind Bernie Sanders. As we know his campaign went nowhere (twice). There are a handful of progressive candidates winning some primaries, but this is abysmal in the larger context. For every progressive that succeeds there is another progressive that fails (see e.g. Nina Turner in Ohio and Jessica Cisneros in Texas). And for every attempt there are 10 non-attempts. And we are even seeing equally many conservative democrats that honestly should belong in the Republican party in the national and state legislators.
Outside of partisan politics the left is seeing some more successes, that is in the broader culture war. This includes broader acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights, calls for immigration reforms, calls for reprimands for centuries of slavery, etc. However these successes are not making their way to the legislator by a long shot, and quite often to the contrary (see e.g. reversal of Roe v. Wade).
And I say this firmly from the left wing of the political spectrum.
The far left has been entirely captured by the illiberal (really, anti-liberal) sociopolitical frameworks of Critical Theory, and this has now fully been integrated into most modern day institutions by the ruling class, such as universities, corporations, etc. This is backwards looking, it’s already happened. Before I can vote for the left again (which I used to) I need to see them explicitly reject many of the principles behind Critical Theory.
Can you elaborate? How is critical theory affecting the policy advocated by left wing political candidates? Which left wing ideology did they promote previously which you could vote for, but are unable to now because of which specific policy? Can you give me an example of critical theory expressed by the left wing candidates in your elective district? And why these examples in particular make it so that you can’t vote for them?
Leaving aside the inherent bias of asking the general public whether they support a vague and/or nuanced issue, and also leaving aside these extremely narrow cherry picked issues. Where did you get the data showing that Americans do not support this?
>The poll—which surveyed 1,503 people across the country between May 4 through 17—found 55% of Americans don’t believe transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete in high school sports.
>Almost 60% of those surveyed were opposed to transgender women and girls’ participation in college and professional sports.
>Americans were less likely to oppose transgender women and girls’ participation in youth sports, with about a third of those surveyed saying transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete, while 17% said they did not have an opinion.
>According to the poll, roughly two-thirds of Republicans now believe “parents should be allowed to sue school districts if teachers discuss sexual orientation [70%] or gender identity [66%] when teaching children in kindergarten through grade three.” Independents agree (46% and 47% percent, respectively) more often than not (34% and 36%). And a significant minority of Democrats concur as well (25%, 22%) or aren’t sure (16%, 17%).
And keep in mind that is not people who have read the bill, so they could be basing it on the name.
>When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.
>Overall, 61 percent of voters supported the text of the bill. Just 26 percent were opposed.
I did some vetting on these opinion polls. Your first two seem legitimate. Although I hope you keep in mind the wording of the questions here and the varying levels of nuance that people put into before they answer on a 5 point likert scale. For example the “don’t say gay” bill opinion poll by youGov is not asking about support for the bill, but rather if they should be allowed to sue school districts under certain conditions. You might be in full opposition to the bill in question but still feel like you should always have the right to sue. This is like three levels down from the main focus of the poll and the respondents will read differently into the question, with nuance which doesn’t translate into a 5 point likert scale.
Now for your third poll, it was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies which is a republican pollster. The news source you gave me was written by Amber Athey, a senior fellow of the Steamboat Institute, which is a conservative think tanks that promotes American Exceptionalism and other nationalistic conservative values. I personally don’t put much faith in polls such as these.
Now this is all aside from the fact that these are cherry picked examples. This is hardly proof that “The left is being decimated on the trans and sexual related issue”.
Wow. Just wow. The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries. While you certainly may think Europe is full of "second tier countries", I think it's time to broaden your horizons. If anything the problem is they are ineffective and are poor at keeping file and rank compared to the GOP. The GOP on the other-hand tries to drive the US towards a ultra-conservative future, erasing the separation of church and state.
This may have been true sixty years ago, but certainly not today. The conservative right in European countries is turning hard-nationalist in response to massive net immigration. Simply look to the campaigns of Zemmour and Le Pen in France or Orban in Hungary.
I don't follow their platforms, but in Europe one can still expect conservative parties to believe that people should have public goods like healthcare and childcare and education and retirement as basic human rights, that dignity is something we deserve, that a job should mean something more than wage slavery and that the average citizen shouldn’t die in debt. Who they define as persons or citizens is up for discussion on the right, but measured on this other corporate-capitalist scale of being "right", the Democrats are off the scale in European terms.
Yes, that's all true, but that does not support the claim that the "American radical left is the European conservative right". In some ways, some of the demands of the American radical left mimic some of the expectations of European right-wing platforms, but the American radical left would still be identifiably left-wing in Europe, mostly due to their positions on immigration, regulation, sociology, and taxation.
The follow-up question to demonstrate this point would be "would an American who identifies as radically left-leaning join a European conservative right-wing party if they moved to Europe?"
I think the claim here that: “The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries” is a bit of an exaggeration. A more accurate statement (and probably what OP meant; albeit less inflammatory) would be something like: “Moderate and conservative (i.e. mainstream) Democrats in America closely resemble the conservative right wing parties in Europe”. And I think this is largely true. Biden is in many ways to the right of Macron even though Macron is in the center-right of the political spectrum. While Bernie Sanders (the most left wing the US could possibly hope for) really only approaches the center-left Olaf Scholz.
This isn’t that true today, the US far left is solidly left nowadays by European standards, and Europe had a far right that isn’t too distant from the US
The far left in the US is materially different than the classical understanding of the far left. The far left in the US is now primarily concerned with pushing the goals of Critial Theory (a cultural neo-Marxist ideology, to oversimplify) as supposed to the goals of traditional big S Socialist or Marxist economics and workers party goals. This slow dialectical evolution of the left in the US has led to a lot of confusion regarding how it can be possible for people to be arguing the left in the US is not just extreme but increasingly radicalized when it rejected democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. It's because the revolutionary tilt of the left has moved away from overturning economic class and systems of capitalism through labor organization, at least as the primary lever to push on.
Oh my god the Patterson bullshit. Please mate, stop the cap. Bernie Sanders is the furthest 'left' in the US and man wants free education and healthcare which are the status quo in every other developed country.
Cultural Marxism is not a thing, please educate yourself beyond the videos of the lobster psychologist. You claim the left is 'radicalized' in a right-wing country where the right-wing party literally tried to undermine democracy through an insurrection less then a year ago...
My bad, he's the most egregious offender of that BS in the media space. What I'm getting at here is that the US has no true left. Your workers are exploited and healthcare/education/life costs are making it so that jumping over the poverty line is getting so hard you might as well live in a third world country.
And somehow the narrative is about the non-existent 'radicalized left' doing stuff and cultural Marxists trying to change our pronouns. It just feels sad to hear.
Bernie Sanders wants a lot more than that and would be left by European views as well, and yeah the left has become radicalized just like the right has, this is all non-controversial
No he's not. You do realize free healthcare, education and social security is the DEFAULT in Europe. Even in conservative countries. That's far from 'far left'.
The left in the US is to the left of Europe now in many ways. By second tier I wasn’t referring to politics, but referring to our collapse into a weak economic and cultural power.
A slide into a second tier country? I lament the difficulty I have in understanding how one to come to this belief after the last 10 years. It's like we don't even share the same facts anymore.
Guy here who also got pushed into the arms of the right based on what the left has been doing. Interesting that you think going in this direction apparently merits some kind of emergency introspection while going in the other direction doesn’t. People want different things out of life.
What has "the left" done that pushed you away to support a part that says LGBTQ people should be able to get married, that their version of the Christian god deserves special protections in law, etc? Those are explicate positions documented in the GOP platform that members of the GOP are required to support.
Since you seem to agree with the user above, can you give any concrete examples of how the left "went off the deep end" or just explain what you take issue with the left doing?
I am particularly curious about politicians and their actions, rather than woke twitter users, since we are discussing who we vote for. Please do mention if wokeness is your main complaint with the left, as it seems to be the case for many conservatives I know, but I felt the need to mention I don't believe wokeness is actually relevant amongst politicians.
As far as I can tell, left leaning politicians have not gone off the deep end in any objective sense. Their voting patterns seem to be mostly centrist/conservatives leaning and have remained that way for some time.
Without concrete examples, it is really hard to accept "people want different things" as an explanation for statements that I would consider to be outright false. So I ask in hopes that I might understand the opposing perspective on this.
In 2019, Democrats in Virginia tried to pass a bill that would allow abortion at the point of birth. Long past viability, basically just unnecessarily killing the baby.
I'm not a conservative, but I respect conservative values such as the rule of law. I will grant you that the populist wing of the Republican party in no way reflects conservative values.
> There are a lot of people who have seen the left in the US go off the deep end
As crazy as the left in the U.S. might be, it's genuinely hard to beat the craziness of e.g. suggesting that injecting bleach is a legitimate COVID-19 treatment, or shameful pandering to anti-masks, anti-vaccination sentiment.
People who spend too much time on twitter think they have seen the left go off the deep end. But what insane policy has actually occurred? Biden isn't off the deep end. Meanwhile the right has actually passed laws to tear apart families with trans kids, have actually passed laws to turn citizens into vigilantes to track down women having abortions, have actually tried to stage an insurrection, have actually put dishonest supreme court justices on the bench. But the left has gone off the deep end because there exist unhinged radical leftists on twitter saying crazy things.
Left intellectuals have gone off the deep end, sure, but the actual left politicians in power are solidly centrist.
Meanwhile Trump.... The Republican party isn't just off the deep end, they're a genuine danger to democracy globally. As the US goes, many other countries follow and as a Brit, and conservative one that grew up in the Thatcher/Reagan heyday at that, I dread the thought of another Trump presidency. I'll never forgive the Republican party for putting us through that the first time. Thank all the gods and angels the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened under Biden, he may be a bumbler but at least he's not an out-and-out traitor to democracy and the national security of his country.
I see this kind of comment a lot and it's bizarre to me. It echoes Elon's own views [1]. It's bizarre because it shows just how normalized right-wing views are in the US. Some highlights:
1. There are like 4 progressive members of Congress. Compare this to how many Republicans openly support QAnon conspiracies and other right-wing positions;
2. Anywhere else in the world, the Democrats would be a center-right party;
3. The Democratic Party actually hates progressives and goes out of its way to rid the party of them. Look at the hit job on Bernie Sanders in 2016. Look at the recent primary in the Texas-28 where Nancy Pelosi and Clyburn went to campaign for Henry Cuellar, who is pro-gun and the only anti-choice Democrat remaining in the House over Cisneros, an actual progressive;
4. Based on leaks there's a high likelihood the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, pushing back 50 years of progress;
5. IN 2008 (in Heller) the Supreme Court for the first time recognized the Second Amendment as an individual right;
6. The Roberts Supreme Court also decided money is speech, which has openeed the floodgates for primarily conservative PACs;
7. The same court gutted the Civil Rights Act in terms of voter protection, which has led to a wave of anti-voter measures in red states;
8. Primarily red state has gerrymandered the hell out of states. For example, in Wisconsin, the GOP holds a super-majority despite getting 10% less of the vote;
9. Despite numerous incidents of easy access to firearms leading to the mass murder of school children multiple times there is not (and will not be) any meaningful restriction on access to mass murder machines (aka assault rifles);
10. Obamacare, pretty much the only lasting achievement of the Obama era, has largely been gutted;
11. Trump's tax cuts despite a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control of the House and Senate remain largely in place; and
12. As soon as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, they'll probably next come for gay marriage.
This is just off the top of my head. So how exactly has the left gone off the "deep end" exactly?
There's really only been progress on two issues:
1. Gay marriage was legalized (but, as noted, that's at risk of being reversed); and
2. There have been advancements in trans rights.
This I think is the crux of the matter when people talk about the "far left". They really mean they hate trans people and want them to go away.
Conservatives are sore winners but great propagandists as evidenced by the fact that this myth that conservatives are "losing" perpetuates at all.
They never have any examples to back their claim. But the message is always the same: the left has gone too far. Its clearly more important to get that out then it is to defend it with logic, probably because of the truthiness of the statement.
I would wager good money that in many cases these "I was left wing, but the insane Left pushed me to the GOP!" posters were never, in fact, left wing and are instead trying to spread a particular message. See also the "walk away" hashtag that was pushed in the lead up to 2020.
I agree with your points, but I think you're painting with too broad of a brush with:
> They really mean they hate trans people and want them to go away.
It is certainly an issue; viz various bathroom panics over the last decade. But, at least in the tech sphere, most of the fear I've seen comes from Twitter BS and hate. There are vocal people who want to use "wokeness" as a tool to attack people. I can see how it would be easy to conflate those kinds of attacks with progressivism for people who are predisposed against progressivism from the start.
I'm not sure about that. The right is returning to a more traditional conservatism. The right used to support tariffs, using the government to push their agenda, more of a small tent party, nationalist, etc. The small government conservative, neoconservative, globalist, and big tent ideologies are new (for conservatives) and being rejected. I don't think returning to your roots is "bonkers".
