politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
This is a good thing. The only way the red states will change is by getting worse and worse. They will have no doctors, teachers, nurses, lawyers, or corporations that will purposefully live or do their work there if they can help it. If you are a woman, a person of color, a migrant, an LGBTQ person, a child, or anything other than an old white man, the red states are no longer safe for you.
I basically refuse to go to most of those states if I can help it. Florida? You couldn't pay me to set foot in that state. I feel they same about Texas and many others.
I want conservatism to thrive. It does have a place in a healthy political system. But, my friends, the conservatives are the moderate Dems now. I don't know what else to call the Republicans, other than fascists or cult members. It is a sickness that any person in their right mind should run as fast as they can from.
The truly upsetting part about this is that there are people that are desperate to leave those fascist states, that can't for a variety of reasons outside their control. I wish things were different. This is just insanity.
What place is that? Conservatism at it's core is about maintaining the aristocracy/hierarchy. That's what it started as, and it's never wavered from that mission. All of the claims towards 'conserving what is good' or 'fiscal responsibility' or 'protecting individual rights' are just that: claims. They have never acted in ways that would back those claims up unless their actions also helped maintain/promote the aristocracy. The rest is just noise and propaganda designed to make their positions sound palatable.
I don't see any place for that in a healthy political system.
I disagree with you, but respectfully. Conservatism is basically just people who, for a variety of reasons (not all of them bad), generally vote for the status quo. This is human nature. Progressives are willing to push forward but also sometimes without regard to some of the consequences. Also human nature. Some people are bold and some people are timid. Having both around in a balanced way helps us all move forward with careful thought. That system is good overall.
The problem is that conservatives are really moderate democrats now. The modern Republicans are not conservatives. They are fascist cultist morons. I believe I explained myself fairly well in my first post. You might want to read the whole thing next time :)
I disagree that it is "good" overall. Conservative policies have always stood in the way of any movement to treat all people equally because the status quo benefits a sections of the population. Slavery. Racism. Sexism. Etc. None of these needed to be "conserved" and we would be a better society if we had been able to address them sooner. Also, conservative power structures when threatened by progress default to authoritarian in brutal fashion. The Holocaust. The Civil War. The Inquisition. Etc. And this is just in the West.
The modern Republican is not an aberration. It is the final form of Conservatism.
I have seen no proof that the consequences of rampant Progressivism are in any way equal to the horrors of rampant Conservatism. The idea that we need to validate Conservativism to "balance out" Progressivism seems to me to be a dangerous myth that is paid for with the blood of oppressed people.
There have been many cases in history where the forces in society seeking positive change have caused untold damage to their societies. The French Revolution started out with the oppressed peasantry seeking liberation from a decadent and constrictive nobility, but ended in hundreds of people getting their heads cut off before the pendulum swung back and Napoleon took control, and briefly created one of the biggest empires in European history. Napoleon was less conservative than the Ancien Regime but he certainly wasn't a revolutionary.
Another example is the Bolsheviks, who started out as oppressed workers in Russia who wanted liberation from an exploitative and authoritarian tsar, but as soon as they actually gained power, were usurped by a complete megalomaniac who sent thousands of people to labor camps, destroyed most of Russia's social institutions in order to subsume them into the state, committed numerous genocides (some more direct than others), and destroyed Russia's demographics and long-term economic prosperity with a breakneck-pace industrialization. Joseph Stalin's ideological offshoot, Mao Zedong, also did similarly horrible things in China, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, despite starting out as the leader of a peasant rebellion seeking liberation from literal feudalism.
Apart from the Nazis, who can only debatably be considered "conservative" considering they didn't really wanna conserve much of anything about society, conservative insanity doesn't tend to be anywhere near as destructive to society in the short term as progressive insanity is. Instead, conservative insanity causes society to completely stagnate, remaining behind socially and technologically while other societies rush ahead, as happened to Tsarist Russia.
Seeing all this, you'd have to be either biased or stupid to deny the necessity of conservativism in society. Progress is often necessary, today included in many areas, but society must have a conservative wing to prevent the progressives from changing things which are better off left alone.
Nazis were “debatably” conservative my ass, fucking sad that this filth is already spreading on the fediverse
Fascism is linked to conservatism through an extreme form of it. The United States has had six Presidents whose policies and practices identify them as part of the Fascist wing of politics. William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
What did the Nazis want to conserve, exactly? They hated Christianity, they hated free-market capitalism, they wanted to wipe out half the continent and settle it with Germans, and they wanted to completely reshape every aspect of society around the state. They didn't wanna conserve shit, except maybe the Junkers' economic dominance.
Every German soldier had "Got mitt uns" (God is with us) on their belt buckles.
Most Nazis were Christians.
The idea that the Nazis hated Christianity is silly. Some upper-echelon Nazis might have, but the overall members of the Nazi Party were Christians. Including the participants in the Holocaust. They were doing it because Martin Luther said so.
By this logic, the Soviet Union was a Christian nation because the vast majority of their soldiers believed in God during WW2.
The nazis were overwhelmingly christian tho. They even formed their own special form of it that literally just takes out the jews.
The soviet union specifically prosecuted christians, so trying to say they were the same is wild
Using Christianity for propaganda reasons doesn't change the fact that the Nazis wanted to restructure the German people's belief system around their pseudoscientific racial theories and state-worship. Another thing to note is that the Nazis hated the Catholic Church, which about half of Germany followed, and didn't tolerate Protestant sects which went against their ideology. Following Christianity was absolutely not a priority for the Nazis. They'd have absolutely gotten rid of it if they could.
Hierarchy. And reactionaries are still right wing, even if they want to recreate an imagined past of hierarchies rather than just conserving the existing ones.
I didn't say they weren't right wing, only that they weren't conservative. Going backwards isn't conserving anything.
The NAZI Party originally sought to conserve the right of white Germany (they didn't view Jewish people as white) and their Roman Catholic religious power. Prussia was part of the Holy Roman Empire and the NAZI Party in part wanted to bring that back in their early days. Popes Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958) led the Catholic Church during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany while the Catholic-aligned Centre Party voted for the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Adolf Hitler additional domestic powers to suppress political opponents as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler and several other key Nazis had been raised as Catholics though they became more hostile to the Church in their adulthood. Article 24 of the National Socialist Program called for conditional toleration of Christian denominations and the 1933 Reichskonkordat treaty with the Vatican guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics.
Eventually, the alliance fell apart and Nazis sought to suppress the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. Catholic press, schools, and youth organizations were closed, property was confiscated, and about one-third of its clergy faced reprisals from authorities; Catholic lay leaders were among those murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Anti-Semitism was present in both German Catholicism, and anti-Semitic acts and attitudes were infrequent in Catholic areas. After the alliance's failure, Catholic priests went on to play a major role in rescuing Jews. The Catholic church rescued thousands of Jews by issuing false documents to them, lobbying Axis officials, and hiding Jews in monasteries, convents, schools, the Vatican, and the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo. The Reich Security Main Office called the Pope a "mouthpiece" for the Jews and in his first encyclical (Summi Pontificatus), he called the invasion of Poland an "hour of darkness". In his 1942 Christmas address, the Pope denounced race murders, and in his 1943 encyclical Mystici corporis Christi, the Pope denounced the murder of disabled people.
Even so, in the post-war period, false identification documents were given to many German war criminals by Catholic priests such as Alois Hudal, frequently facilitating their escape to South America. Catholic clergy routinely provided Persilschein or "soap certificates" to former Nazis in order to remove the "Nazi taint"; but at no time was such aid an institutional effort. According to Catholic historian Michael Hesemann, the Vatican itself was outraged by such efforts, and Pope Pius XII demanded the removal of involved clergy such as Hudal.
An apple is a fruit but not all fruits are apples. So stupid.
What did the Nazis want to conserve, exactly? They hated Christianity, they hated free-market capitalism, they wanted to wipe out half the continent and settle it with Germans, and they wanted to completely reshape every aspect of society around the state. They didn't wanna conserve shit, except maybe the Junkers' economic dominance.
Also I can tell you have absolutely nothing of value to add since you defaulted to calling me a Nazi because I made a pretty clear observation. Nah, don't bother explaining shit on the political discussion sub, just say everyone you don't like is evil. It's like I'm back on Reddit
Dude, word roots are often far from their eventual meanings because language evolves. No one with a clue thinks of conserving when they say conservatism. If you want an argument over semantics, maybe there’s a linguistics sub? If you want to talk politics, you don’t just get to decide a word must only literally reflect its etymological root, rather than taking into account the actual actions of people and parties who have called themselves conservatives for the past 50+ years.
The fact of the matter is that "conservative" means that one tends to be resistant to change, and that most self-proclaimed conservatives run on platforms of resisting change. The Nazis, meanwhile, changed nearly everything about their society. Also, words have meanings.
You’re right, but every reputable linguist in 2023 recognizes that over time, the meanings of those words change because of how they’re used by the population speaking the language. You’re right, words have meanings, but those meanings change. Sorry you haven’t kept up.
The nazis are reactionaries which means they want to go back to feudalism. If you knew about how horrible feudalism was you would have supported the french revolution and the october revolution.
Although it can be said that the Nazis coopted the aesthetics of feudalism in much of what they did, and that people like Heinrich Himmler actually did wish to return to that kind of society, I don't believe it can be said that the Nazis actually wished to return to a legitimately feudal society. The main difference is that under Nazism, the most important thing in one's life was meant to be the Aryan race and the state, while under feudalism, the most important thing in one's life was religion.
The things the revolutionaries did to the people of France and Russia were straight up evil. Committing mass murder and establishing a cult based around yourself is just plain evil, doesn't matter what your intentions are or who you're rebelling against. Revenge against oppressors isn't a valid thing to base your policies on and destroying the fabric of society in order to rebuild it based on your ideal always has completely horrifying outcomes.
Fascists shared many of the goals of the conservatives of their day and they often allied themselves with them by drawing recruits from disaffected conservative ranks, but they presented themselves as holding a more modern ideology, with less focus on things like traditional religion, and sought to radically reshape society through revolutionary action rather than preserve the status quo. Fascism opposed class conflict and the egalitarian and international character of socialism. It strongly opposed liberalism, communism, anarchism, and democratic socialism.
MAGA Republicans today practice Fascism, Donald Trump was a Fascist Conservative by definition. The NAZI Party was a Fascist Party that modern Fascists idolize. That doesn't mean that MAGA Republicans are equal to members of the NAZI Party, they are not. It is better to call them by the type of politics they practice, which is Fascism, a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
Yes, this is true, just like communists share many goals with Bernie Sanders. You wouldn't call communists liberal or call Bernie Sanders a communist though. They are completely different things with some overlap.
Being anti-communist is a characteristic of every ideology to the right of communism and being opposed to anarchism is a characteristic of every ideology above anarchism. Opposing class conflict is also a characteristic of any ideology which doesn't advocate socialism. None of this really narrows fascism down very well.
By what fucking definition?
While MAGA Republicans are certainly populists, definitely believe the nation to be above the individual, and their leaders act like they want a dictatorship, they are not expansionist enough to be anything like the original fascists (In fact, they actually tend to believe the US needs to stop involving itself in foreign affairs) and they're also not very totalitarian, often wanting the state not to interfere in economic matters. By contrast, old-school fascists wanted private enterprise to be subordinate to the state, in a system designed as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism which they called corporatism. Calling MAGA Republicans fascists is not true, nor is it very useful, and throwing that term around only lends credence to their assertion that we're just a bunch of snowflakes who can't handle people disagreeing with them. It is more useful and more accurate to call them by the more broad term "right-wing populist" instead.
MAGA Republicans' policies and ideals match fascism on every level. They have nothing in common with traditional Republican values. There isn't a political ideology called populists, that is the nickname for extremist politicians be they communists or fascists.
You won't win this argument here though. These people don't know the difference between conservativism and US Republicanism.
I think you bring up very good examples. The communists in China with their cultural revolution is another example of progressive policies gone wrong. Children undergoing sex change operations and later regretting it could possibly be viewed as one in a few decades. (Examples of these do exist and their stories are heartbreaking.)
While I do agree that handing out hormone treatments like candy is a bad idea and we need to do more unbiased research into how best to treat children with gender dysphoria without potentially making their lives worse, please stay real here. Nobody allows or advocates for children to undergo actual sex change operations. I also wouldn't consider this to be on the same level as what communists did in Russia and China, or what the revolutionaries did in France.
I strongly suggest reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. He makes an excellent case that, from Edmund Burke to now, conservatism has been about preserving historical hierarchies. Men over women, straight over gay, white over Black, religious over not, etc. The status quo just tends to be full of hierarchies we haven’t rooted out, so their claim seems believable even though it’s false.
ah so if you're poor, taking care of loved ones, or otherwise unable to move, then your life is acceptable collateral damage? accelerationism has victims.
Yes I totally agree. this sucks. What would you have us do? I already vote blue. That is probably the best thing we can all do. I will not set foot in a bright red state for any reason at this point. That is self preservation and protecting my own family.
People who've never been to those states don't realize they're literally a trap.
The rent and cost of living is lower, sure, but so is the pay, and so even if you want to leave you just don't nake enough money to save up. Moving is expensive, and a lot of blue states cost a lot more than red, so it's extremely difficult to not only put money aside to move, but also enough to cover the higher cost of living.
And then what if you can't find a job right away? A lot of folks in the south couldn't afford an education, so we get stuck as unkilled labor which makes it harder to find a living wage.
Meanwhile you have well off people who've never really struggled in the same way aaying it's their fault for not moving sooner, or in a lot of cases accuse them of "refusing help" somehow.
It's tiring and extremely frustrating.
I hear this a lot. If you have a better solution that protects the safety and rights of people leaving, while helping those who can’t? Because if not, you’re not helping. “Stay and suffer because not everyone can leave” is a broken idea. And if you think the current institutional infrastructure is capable of solving this problem, I have a lovely bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
That is NOT what I said. I'm not going to criticize people leaving, and I think it's the best option GIVEN an option. It's a very exclusive strategy that I don't want to be endorsing. Obviously electoral politics are broken. Maybe we can use our imagination tho
Florida Republicans are working reeaally hard to kill their state's entire economy right now. Attacking Disney (the state's biggest employer) and undocumented immigrants (the backbone of the state's agricultural industry and a key part of the labor force for various others such as construction and hospitality), driving away teachers by taking away their right to actually teach, etc.
Not to mention denying climate change, as the states is getting ready to spend the next thousand years covered in seaweed 25 feet high.
I wholeheartedly disagree. We need to wake up to a more refined political system. A two party system will not sustain a future. We are in a lull due to the previous 6 years being a total shit show.
However, a healthy political system represents the constituents. Our system represents the representatives. Europe has the right idea and has been doing it a lot longer. Having 12 candidates elected on merit makes the country more productive and satisfied with their choice.
I totally agree. I don't like a two party system, nor did I advocate for one. We need to separate progressive, moderate, conservative, etc from party affiliation. All of those European candidates running all fall on that spectrum regardless of their party. In the US Democrats have progressives, moderates, and conservatives in the same party. The GOP does not, but they used to have much more diversity of beliefs 40-50 years ago. Post civil rights and especially since Nixon, the Republicans have continually devolved into the total fascist shit show that we see today.
If the US would move away from the two party system for elections like Alaska has recently done, we would end up with much better candidates. Ranked choice voting for whoever the best candidate is regardless of party. I would love that.
They don't care.
Drive through WV and let me know how much further it has to fall for them to get it.
Go to full red states and listen to them complain about issues that are 100% state legislature and governor issues. But they find a way to blame Obama, Biden, and still fucking cry about Clinton. Both of the Clintons.
The brainwashing is 100%
I wish there was some kind of fund that we could setup to help relocate the vulnerable in red states (aka everyone but straight white men) but I'm sure they'd figure out a way to mess with it.
There kinda is actually:
https://www.rainbowrailroad.org/
It's limited to LGBTQ+, and I'm not sure how active they are in the U.S., but as the demand for it grows here I'm sure the help they'll allocate towards getting people away from fascists will grow as well.