On Medium: How Democrats Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight
Here's an article that compares conservative and liberal cultural values to account for Democratic malpractice, such as in that party's inability to plan for the eventual overturning of Roe v Wade.
https://eand.co/were-not-going-to-make-it-to-2050-5398cf97b805
ReplyDeleteI've often tried to imagine what an effective liberal statesman would look like. I think he would need to be diplomatic and civil on the surface, but ruthlessly pragmatic and machiavellian beneath -- call him the velvet glove. Light Yagami from Death Note comes close to embodying this archetype; though he wasn't particularly left wing, he was nonetheless motivated by a passionate desire for justice rather than for money or fame. A real life example might be Richard Nixon who, though he was a Republican, championed many liberal causes. Tricky Dick gave Americans OSHA, the EPA, and SSI; he expanded medicade and food stamps, and even tried to enact a universal basic income plan.
ReplyDeleteI think the defining characteristic of conservatives is not necessarily their pragmaticism (though they are more pragmatic than most liberals), but rather a contempt for civilization -- which is something you've gone into detail about in previous essays here. They pontificate about law and order, but really they love creating chaos because it's the only environment in which they can thrive and acquire power. The Democrats need a Nixon: someone who cares enough about the social order to eschew self-defeating liberal platitudes about 'fairness' and 'bipartisonship' and get their hands dirty. The conservatives are the enemy. You don't look for common ground with your enemy. Obama tried to make peace with them and look what happened. And forget about fighting fair. This isn't a baseball game, it's war.
It's an interesting question since this ideal humanistic politician would be both liberal and conservative in different ways. FDR and Johnson are often regarded as the most competent liberal leaders in the US since they passed major legislations. Both did so by using tragedies as pretexts, namely the Great Depression and MLK's assassination. This was Obama's major failure: he didn't use the Great Recession as such a pretext for reforming the financial sector.
DeleteThere's also a question which I've tried to answer in some articles, about how progressive politicians have changed over the last century. There was once a whole Progressive Era in the US, but after WWII the culture had to reckon with American superpower on the world stage. The call for further progress became decadent and "woke" because much had already been achieved. America's problems became merely First World ones.
Of course, success in achieving such progress (civil rights, government reform, etc) has hardly created an ideal society. On the contrary, humanistic progress is itself destructive of the natural environment, which threatens social stability in lots of ways. And the ideal free market would likewise generate all kinds of unfairness and inhuman power dynamics (economic inequality, oligarchic capture of the regulators, and so on). But progressives can seem greedy, ungrateful, and subversive by seizing on these further calls for reform. Most "progressives" would prefer to enjoy the fruits of past success, which makes for the DNC's complacency and for the myopia of the young progressives who don't even vote.
Short answer: because they are stupid, unfortunately.
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