It might seem otherwise but it’s actually true. I hang out on places like Daily Kos. All of the people I follow on Twitter are progressive or liberal Democrats. To me, the Republican Party is the enemy, especially this blatantly fascist latest version. Thing is though, don’t be fooled. They’ve always been like this.
None of this surprises me because I’ve been around Republicans and American conservatives (one of the worst of the breed) my whole life.
I’ve been on the Left my whole life. People keep telling me I’m a conservative, so I’ve been researching conservatism all over the world. I more or less hate it everywhere. It always the same garbage, against everything I stand for. I know I take a lot of anti-SJW points on here and I don’t write many liberal articles, but that’s because my audience has been mostly conservatives and Republicans forever.
Most liberals hate me and don’t even ask about the people further left, who seem to want me dead. Liberals come here for a bit and then freak out and run away, screaming, “Racist! Sexist! Misogynist! Homophobic! Transphobic! Bigoted! Conservative!” It’s sad because I’m probably left on the vast majority of issues and I’m only conservative on some social issues, and even then, I’m not as conservative as a Republican social conservative. But liberals and Democrats are party-liners nowadays, as bad as Communists.
So I’ve never had much of a liberal audience, and hence there’s no audience for me to write for. But I’m definitely a man of the Left. And the Republican Party is absolutely fascist in its present orientation, Trump’s presidency has been a horrorshow that doesn’t even seem real because it’s so beyond anything I’ve experienced. And right now, of course Trump is trying to steal an election. Really the Republican Party is trying to overthrow a liberal winner of an election with a coup.
That’s what the Latin American Right does. I said the other day that our breed is starting to resemble them. The Latin American Right believes in minority rule forever and they also believe that the Left has no right to rule their countries, no matter how many elections they win. They’re simply not allowed to win.
If they lose an election, they typically scream fraud when there never is any, or they foment a military (Honduras), legislative (Paraguay), judicial (Brazil), or economic (Venezuela) coup of some sort or another. The Latin American Right is absolutely fascist in character and behavior.
There is absolutely zero evidence for any of the crazy voter fraud (actually election fraud) allegations levelled by the Republicans. I’ve studied them all in depth. For one thing, there’d be a vast blue shift in the difference between the outcome and the exit and pre-election polls. Instead there were a mere two blue shifts.
And there were 39 red shifts, many of large percentages. There is no way on Earth you could possible have 39 red shifts, often of a significant number of points, in any election. Poll failure, especially massive failure of all the polls – mass poll failure, does not occur. The polls are not rigged for the Democrats. In particular, exit polls pretty much never go off. They can’t. Any time you have mass shifts in outcomes versus exit polls, the only explanation is fraud.
In a number of states, the Republicans stole up to 10 points. They’ve never been this brazen before. I’d tell you if the Democrats cheated and they didn’t. The Republicans are projecting. They’re the ones who engage in election fraud via the voting machines that they own and run.
The latest appalling news is that the legislatures of 17 Republican state governments (many stolen with voting machine election fraud, particularly in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. They had a lot of help from gerrymandered districts that make it almost impossible for a Democrat to carry them.
Outrageously, the Supreme Court approved these blatantly anti-democratic gerrymanders. The Republicans have been engaging in mass voter suppression for 20 years now. When you have mass voter suppression, you do not have democracy. When you have gerrymandered districts that the opposition can never win, you do not have democracy. When you have continuous election theft via electoral fraud with voting machines for two decades, you do not have a democracy.
I don’t know why Democratic morons keep screaming about saving our democracy. Supposedly we just rescued our democracy this time around. Like Hell we did. We simply made a dent in the rightwing authoritarian government we have had for at least 20 years in this country. America has no democracy. We are an authoritarian state – a dictatorship in a sense. Americans need to quit insisting we have a democracy here. That went away a long time ago.
The trick now is to get it back, which is the project I support. I support bringing democracy back to the US and rescuing it from this rightwing corporate dictatorship. And for that we need to do some extreme things like pack the Supreme Court, expand the lower courts and pack them too, add DC and Puerto Rico (if they wish) as new states, etc. I don’t want to fill the judges’ seats with unfair partisan Democrats. Then we will be replacing their Republican dictatorship with a Democratic dictatorship. I will settle for fair-minded justices who are committed to bring back our democracy and sustaining it going forward.
I don’t really understand US conservatism, what exactly is it trying to conserve? Is it just classical liberalism mixed with some Northwestern European type of ethnocentrism/racism?
Does the white working class in the US really not see through bullshit capitalist-funded populism?
I’m Latin-American but I actually have some sympathy for the US White working class. Sometimes I think there should be a North American nationalism/protectionism to protect the two big majorities: White and Hispanic workers. Perhaps by focusing more on what we have in common and with some compromises on the part of both groups, radical socioeconomic policies can be implemented. Eventually this North American nationalism/protectionism will have to evolve into a Pan-American nationalism/protectionism.
Looking forward to what you think.
US conservatism is about conserving and enhancing the status of those already high up the ladder, and mostly those at the very top. And it’s really not so much about conserving their position as it is about increasing their wealth and power while decreasing the wealth and power of the rest of society.
And it’s not just disparities in wealth and power that US conservatives want to increase but disparities in what we might call “cultural standing” or social perception. So they want most people to be increasingly looked down on and to be made to feel crummy about their lives while getting ordinary people to look at those up top as superhuman and godlike.
“Traditional” Burkean conservatism was about accepting the system as is on the assumption that it developed this way for reasons we might not understand and that altering it too much too quickly could be very dangerous while also allowing for slow change to address the needs of the masses.
So there was a progressive leaning in that kind of conservatism, but it was deliberately meant to be slow progress. And this type of traditional conservatism was always largely just a way for those at the affluent to keep others in their place despite its theoretical grounding which many adherents probably didn’t care much about. However, those conservatives were more willing to yield and compromise.
Today’s American conservatism, which has become the mainstream since Reagan, aims not only to preserve privilege and inequality but rather to exacerbate them. What’s called “conservatism” in the US is a form of reactionary politics. Or you can think of it as a kind of radical conservatism: a radicalism from above instead of from below.