Why America is moving left
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
On another note, it's interesting how at the same time, a lot of Europe seems to be getting more right wing politically. Okay, not in the sense of certain social attitudes (support for equality hasn't changed), but definitely in the sense of euroscepticism, thoughts on immigration, etc.
Not really. Seriously, not at all. It's just that whenever a group is attacked by another group for something they've said or done, they tend to accuse the other of censorship. It's a frequently misused term.
The most striking recent example I can think of is when a fairly large number of people boycotted Chic-fil-A because the company's ownership was using its money to lobby for far-right social causes. People on the right accused the left of censorship, purely because they don't understand the meaning of the word but they understand that it's a nasty accusation.
If you look at actual instances of censorship, it's really going down. It is a little amazing what you can print and what you can say, compared to a few decades ago. Small towns occasionally do book bans, and the FCC occasionally scolds someone for something they say on-air, but if you look at the content of what's published and put on the air, things are trending closer and closer to anything goes.
A lot of this isn't boycotting. It's trying to kick someone off a large portion of the internet because they said something you don't like by pulling strings or falsely reporting their work as 'illegal'. It's trying to remove 'wrongthink' because your political narrative crumbles the minute it's put under any scrutiny.
There's definitely an interest in censorship there. Double so on college campuses and some other such areas.
If that falls under your definition of censorship, we've got a pretty fundamental disagreement.
If Twitter is now part of the mainstream, how is banning unpopular opinions on the platform not censorship? Perhaps this is ultimately self-correcting and these unpopular opinions will find other outlets for expression, but I don't understand how you can not consider this a form of censorship? Is it only censorship when its perpetrated by the government?
Which to be fair, is a problem with the internet and much of the modern day world. So much that people depend on is privately owned that freedom in the 'from government' sense is basically meaningless.
This may not exactly be censorship but it's basically punishing climate change skepticism. Seems a bit far reaching and used as a political tool to try to scare away other groups from funding research that may be skeptical of the current science. How exxon shareholders were damaged by this, and how they will be better off by giving company equity to the NY attorney general office and lawyers is beyond me
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/05/news/exxonmobil-climate-chan...
Its charging a company with a legal obligation to disclose material facts relevant to its future business prospects for misrepresenting the information it had.
That's not "punishing climate skepticism" except to the extent that "climate skepticism" is a label which abuses "skepticism" to mean "active, knowing misrepresentation".
I see little to no evidence that this country has moved left over the past 30 years other than GWB's expansion of Medicare and Reagan's Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.
Don't assume the battle is won because you've captured a couple of cities and papers. The fact remains that the majority, at least in America, seem to be somewhat socially conservative.
EDIT: It'd be nice if we were more liberal. The biggest obstacle to that is the haughtiness and premature victory behavior that is endemic to the progressives right now.
Houston lost an important proposition for equality recently because all the progressives assumed the battle was won...and then they lost when the biblethumpers got their congregations to the polls.
What also didn't help is that this vote was attached to an off-year municipal election, in which the median voter age was 70.
I don't have all the background knowledge on this and I'm admittedly not an expert on LGBT, but that's actually pretty brilliant. I have no particular feelings on LGBT stuff, but I certainly wouldn't want anyone that still has male genitalia in the same bathroom as anyone's wife or daughters.
Not because I think those exact people would be harmful or aggressive, and this is more than likely going to be met with accusations of me being a bad man- but I don't know who else out there is going to pretend they're trans to creep/spy/abuse women.
If they've gone far enough to do the operation and use the other facilities then I see no problem. That shows more commitment to the issue than I'd ever be able to muster.
There's also a lot of Hispanics in Houston (I'm Anglo but my wife is a native-born Mexican; mother in law is Mexican in Mexico and has a 2nd home in The Woodlands; my cousin's family are Chicanos and own a non-profit publishing company in Houston; and my wife's aunt is a semi-famous LGBT Chicana author/professor, enough for a Wikipedia page, at the University of California). In my experience (probably extensive compared to the average HNer as I've lived in Zapopan, Jalisco; speak Spanish and married to a Mexican)- Latin Americans born there tend to be socially conservative and economically liberal, while Chicanos are just average Americans with some hispanic cultural background when you get down to it. Similar to how some folks run around saying they're Italian-American, they're just American but it makes people feel special (the real Italians, just like the Latin Americans disagree those Americans have anything in common with them).
"The left" as a whole can't have one part banging on about how all men are rapists if not confined by filled-out consent paperwork, but on the other hand they all have the right to go into women's bathrooms if they say certain magic words, which, by the way, it is transphobic to ask any questions about so don't make any silly claims about how this can't be fraudulently used because any attempt to prevent fraud is ipso facto transphobia. "The left" as a whole is going to have to pick one or the other; there is no way to convince the public of both.
This is the same logic used to discriminate against Muslims because we don't know that they're not terrorists.
(And, incidentally, why on earth does everyone take it for granted that a public bathroom is a place where you can easily spy on other people's genitals? The entire problem could be solved forever if builders used proper floor-to-ceiling walls, with louvered vents for ventilation. It weirds me out that nobody else thinks bathroom design is insane.)
That's not discrimination or racism, that's reality. I'm not saying shoot first or discriminate by having him taken away. I'm saying be aware.
For a bathroom, I don't see it as the exact same thing. I want anyone with a penis in my bathroom not my wife's. Not only could most people with a penis easily overpower her 120lb frame, it does open the door for liars.
There was another post above that made the point: are all people with male genitalia a bunch of rapists? I'm personally spooked to even be friendly to a child I don't know, so I understand his point entirely. Or are we going to be able to walk into a woman's bathroom unrestricted? Difficult to have it both ways or exceptions for people who are mentally a woman but physically a man.
At some point societies have to make some decisions on how we're going to do things and it will always end up imperfect. I agree with you that we can do better but how to achieve that isn't clear without compromising on other factors that others feel are important.
Trump thinks Mexico is sending its rapists to the USA. Marijuana (note the Spanish name) was banned due to propaganda that it was being used by mexicans to rape white women, same story for cocaine and black people, same story for opium and Chinese people. Just handy propaganda to enable state sanctioned discrimination.
One day politicians will tire of inventing problems in order to keep groups down, and start fixing real problems that affect us all. One hundred years of propaganda about rapists yet women are still having to fight to have their accusations taken seriously, to give just one example.
After the 2008 election, the Democrats controlled state governorships 29-22. After the 2014 election, the Republicans controlled them 31-18.
After the 2008 election, the Democrats controlled 62 state legislative houses, with 36 for the Republicans (98 total -- Nebraska has a single, non-partisan legislature). After the 2014 election, the Republicans controlled 68 state houses (the highest number since 1928) and the Democrats controlled only 30 (the lowest number since 1860).
"Moving left"? In a pig's eye.
What bar does the latter cross that the former does not?
The cost shifting due to EMTALA probably isn't real leftist either (I would expect a more leftist policy to share the costs more broadly, not just among those utilizing a hospital).
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188969/red-states-outnumber-blue-...
Is not as if states are independent of people.
Who cares?
> Is not as if states are independent of people.
But people are independent of states. Or to bring the conversation to a less retarded level: plenty of states are very, very sparsely populated and they tend strongly to one party. Measuring their redness or blueness is not interesting because their population is a rounding error. The number of red states vs. blue states does not tell you the direction of the country, it's a predictor of very little except governorship and the U.S. Senate.
I'm all for governance by good sense with an eye toward improving society in general.
Complete rejection of both fear and shame and anyone who wants you to feel them is the only way to escape the left-wing/right-wing dichotomy.
The reality is the country is quite a bit more conservative than Peter Beinart wishes it was. This:
>But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left.
is simply wrong. Barack Obama did not change the American political trajectory. The only thing he did that will last beyond January is the ACA. And even that won't last in its present form.
This is the sort of article people of all political persuasions like to read as they're getting a good ass kicking. "I'm not losing. Look, his knuckles are getting a bit bruised."
What it doesn't do a good job is movement to the left on financial issues. Equality etc., beyond some reference to socialism. The idea of upward mobility is so strongly ingrained as part of US's dogma, even pushing it a little to the left is always going to be hard.
Idealism burns out as it contends with the friction of reality and becomes jaded. Priorities also shift, as save the world becomes save my job becomes save my family.
Speaking as an American, lots of things that a person does day to day aren't messy at all, but there are other things that are incredibly frustrating to have to deal with. So it really depends on what you mean.
The Nazis were not the majority, but they had a plan, and were loud and uncompromising about it.
McCarthy and Co were not the majority, but see how they managed to shaped the laws of the land. The majority didn't care enough to resist.
Presently, the right wing of the Republican party are not the majority in the party, but see how they are helping to define who gets elected to represent their party. By being the loudest, they've marginalized the "moderates" within their party.
In the waning days of an empire, which kicks in long before the empire loses complete grip on its sphere of influence, the empire tends to veer right. And that's because those who consider themselves the most "patriotic", who believe they know how to "make the empire great again", tend to be the loudest.
And they tend to be in the right wing of the political spectrum.
Yes, but the Nazis didn't have to contend with the American system, which would have kept them out of power unless they were able to get 50% + 1 electoral votes.