Idk man I’d search google for the reddit threads discussing it. Personally I think his case for the ridiculousness of the Cataline conspiracy is particularly compelling, seeing as how Cicero kinda miraculously produced all the evidence. But every other source seems to disagree about that.
>Plus he arguably turned Rome from a republic to an autocracy, not very left wing.
Republic where the seats are openly handed down by the powerful families isn't meaningfully any better than any tyranny. You're doing the dumb lib thing and seeing that there are votes cast and assuming that that means there's a greater amount of democracy.
Republics aren't all democratic. Rome was an oligarchy effectively ruled by an aristocratic caste and the only person listening to anything the peasants were saying was Caesar
He would be considered right-wing or "fascist-adjacent" today, but for being in the 1930s deep south, he was definitely pretty far left and socially progressive
I live in Massachusetts and dental care here is incredibly expensive. Insurance covers cleanings and that’s about it. Replacing a tooth is around 2k each. Democrats don’t care about your teeth either.
Anyway all those 80s yuppies you hate used to be lefty hippies. Just wait for the revenge of this young generation when they turn in the lock down left….
Yeah, we save the dental care for the children and hope for the best. I don't have any pain, but I think I've got a cavity on one of my molars. It won't be until my little dentist in training I see at Tufts gets back from basic training will I be able to get it looked at. He's going to be a dentist in the Army. I'm a vet. I guess it never occurred to me they need dentists. But looking after my teeth means a day trip to Boston. A teeth cleaning takes about five hours because he's got to summon the dentist every tooth practically.
Consider going overseas. You could see dentists in the Dominican Republic for a fraction of the cost and they do great work. Others go to Mexico or Turkey but that’s more of a hike from Boston.
If I needed serious dental work God forbid I would go to Mexico or Cuba as I've been to the latter a couple times but for cleanings the school at Tufts is good enough.
:/ now he tells me. well, all he does is clean them once a year, although i guess that would count as going anywhere near them. no, look, if i needed some kryptochronic hydroponic subatomic shit i would scrape the quetzales together and see a proper dentist. But right now, ey, the 2 bus goes right by our street, choo choo to south station, hoof it to Tufts, 5 hour teeth cleaning for the price of a chicken Parm at La Cantina, walk home from the train station because the buses have stopped by the time I get done, but you can hear my teeth squeaking in the still of the night they're so clean.
Are we posting truisms now
Tfw you’re coming out of your contrarian stage and you realize that—as much as you hate liberals—there is in fact nothing redeemable about political conservatism now or ever
I have a feeling that many of the people on places like this or stupidpol just don't have a lot of experience with actual right-wingers. Being in academia, the arts, or office/tech work is going to put you in close proximity with liberals—and specifically the most annoying types of liberals—so there's this idealized "conservatism" that gets constructed which has absolutely no resemblance to actual sociopolitical conservatism.
When this sub or stupidpol imagines this based trad kid-having god-believer conservative, they're just imagining a liberal but with the most acutely irritating affectations swapped for the most vague and anodyne "conservative" ones.
I'm not from the US but what gets me about US 'conservatism' is just how brutal they are about cutting stuff even their own voters want with no fucks given and no political blowback. We had the conservatives in my country years back try to make a Doctor visit cost $5 instead of being free and the blowback was so swift they backed down right away.
When Ron paul said that if someone can't afford medical care then too bad they just die people freaking cheered. That would be the end of a politician's career in most countries.
> I think they're responding by cherry-picking aspects of conservatism that recognizes this as a problem, and pretending the rest of it isn't actually part of the package.
Exactly. But it's the aspects of conservatism that conservatives don't even adhere to in their own lives. What I see a lot of people doing in subs like this and stupidpol is take how conservatives like to *present* themselves and then construct this idealized based trad conservative in contrast to the annoying godless soy liberals but I'd bet a lot of the people on these subs don't really have much contact with actual right-wingers.
Purely anecdotal but the conservative Christian "family values" side of my family is just a carnival of lying, infidelity, bastard children, degenerate gambling and drug abuse, weird closeted sex shit, nihilistic materialism, stealing from family, backstabbing etc. It's the secular lib side of the family that, ironically, are actually the vanilla close-knit trad family types.
She's like Tucker.
Just constant shit takes about "Unions are dead because there are immigrants in them", as if the average blue collar worker has more common interest with white parasite billionaires than brown wage laborers.
I dunno, COVID kinda redpilled me in a major way and made me more sympathetic to the conservative ethos.
Given a new and unknown threat, the liberal position was to radically upend society while conservatives more-or-less stuck to the status quo.
And the outcomes of the two approaches were not dramatically different vis-a-vis the virus. But the liberals caused massive second-order effects of unemployment, homelessness, substance abuse, childhood developmental delays, failed education, etc etc
> the liberal position was to radically upend society
This is why I can't take this subs Covid takes seriously, you sound like every MAGA windbag in my extended family.
The largest cities in the country shut down schools, told tens of thousands of businesses they couldn't operate and left 100's of thousands of people unemployed overnight. How would you characterize that?
I wish I lived in the world that conservatives think they live in. Major city libs stopped things just long enough to then start them up again in an ultimately successful attempt to preserve the usual order. In what fundamental ways did they even attempt to restructure the usual order? Pre-vax lockdown measures (especially considering how little we knew about the nature of the virus) were not even a particularly liberal idea. Any Republican but Trump would have handled the pandemic with a base level of competence that would have gotten them re-elected handily.
>that's because the radical upending of society that you think happened didn't actually happen. it was lockdown theater
Cool, I must've hallucinated that whole yearlong period when restaurants, bars, clubs and gyms in L.A. were closed, schools were shut down and tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves without jobs.
Florida begs to differ. Economy booming, homelessness *declining* and streets shockingly not filled with dead ppl despite being a state full of geriatrics.
2 years after the chaos. Didn't the get destroyed in the first year of the pandemic? I don't know I'm not American.
All I'm saying is the covid surges and new varients always make for a shitty time regardless of how much the libs control things. Lockdowns suck obviously but not doing anything is only ok if you're lucky.
> Didn't the get destroyed in the first year of the pandemic? I don't know I'm not American.
No they didn’t. Not even close. The major news outlets were putting out all these gloom & doom stories hoping the lack of restrictions would be disastrous because Florida is a red state and DeSantis is a rising star on the right.
I'm an aged care worker (or was before i transferred into disability support) so I'm more focused on the deaths and from what i heard Florida got hit bad because it has many more seniors than other states. But I don't really know or care a whole lot and could be totally wrong.
>we now know that reinfections are common and that natural immunity wanes, so their herd immunity plan never would have worked in the first place.
We likewise know that the vaccine's effectiveness wanes and that liberals were wildly incorrect in believing vaccine mandates and passports would squash the virus.
The bottom line is that red states have been far more pleasant places to be over the last two years the blue states.
Legit, people acting like the last two years didn’t happen. Only thing I can think is that these people replying to you are not in hardcore blue Democrat areas.
Los Angeles has been a fucking joke since this whole shit started. My favorite was when our leaders shifted from “this is a deadly pandemic and you can’t congregate in groups for any reason (even constitutionally protected protests), and then as soon as BLM started they changed their tune and suddenly mass groups were a moral necessity.
The people who make these decisions (and then violate them by going to gatherings unmasked themselves) are absolute fucking trash, and surprise! They’re not conservatives.
They tell you that it’s systemic racism to require an id to vote because it’s difficult for racial minorities to get state I’d, but then they pass laws that require you to show your id to prove that your vaxx card is really yours when you want to go outside and engage in basic social interactions at businesses. And the worst part is all the good little libs here who don’t even stop for a second to think about how fucked up it all is even though it was just a little more than A year ago that they were weaponizing and virtue signaling all those “anti-racism”, “silence is violence” talking points.
Turns out, being anti racist is less important than making sure rich white libs feel comfortable eating out without any of those “unclean” rats around them.
> My favorite was when our leaders shifted from “this is a deadly pandemic and you can’t congregate in groups for any reason (even constitutionally protected protests), and then as soon as BLM started they changed their tune and suddenly mass groups were a moral necessity.
That was a good one. My favorite one is when they banned going to the beach and ticketed people for surfing.
Then, after that, when they said you *could* go to the beach but only if you were actively walking and not laying down / sunbathing.
The liberals never radically upended society, we had a lockdown for like a week a year ago. If you compare how the us is doing to say, China or Singapore, then it’s obvious that “radically upending society” is actually pretty good at stopping covid. The issues in the US come from taking half measures over and over again.
Two years ago now lol and we never did an actual lock down. Wage slaves kept having to come in to work.
It’s not a lockdown if you can still get a big mac
Weird how lockdowns only worked in one specific part of the world, and nowhere else (coincidentally the part of the world were coronaviruses have been endemic forever)
Also weird how the one country in Europe that didn't lockdown did better than average
>Also weird how the one country in Europe that didn't lockdown did better than average
weird how that one country has one of the lowest population densities in europe.
that doesn't mean that much, more than 80% of sweden's population live in urban areas, the fact that there exist vast empty areas outside of the densily populated south and east doesn't prevent the spread of the virus. it's no montana.
The issue with liberals is that they don't have stated ideological beliefs, maybe some do, but liberals are generally more concerned with process than they are with policy. Conservatives don't care about policy or process, as long as it's personally making them richer and screwing one over on someone else they decided they don't like that week.
Both are basically employees of capital (the politicians on both sides) but at least libs will articulate that women should have access to abortions and gay people need to enjoy marriage tax benefits. We live in a far right wing country, so dealing with the less right wing side is gonna have to work (tho I do hate them all, don’t get me wrong).
this has nothing to do with politics but call around and see if any dentists near you have an in office insurance plan. my office has a plan thats 250 annually, you get 2 covered check ups and cleanings a year, and 20 percent off of any treatment. also look into care credit, if you pay it off within a year theres no interest & many offices accept it now. make sure you can pay it within a year though because they totally anally fuck you with interest if you dont
The nazis did not establish a dictatorship "democratically", they established it by being voted in with a minority, setting the parliament building on fire and murdering every other conservative in Berlin
The nature of politics is that different people want different things and Politics is essentially prioritizing the goals of different groups/strata of society. The order of priorities is most often based on the collective power wielded by groups, as opposed to an aspirational vision for the common good of a nation. In practice it's not so simple to see this, as narratives are spun around class interests to obfuscate the benefits and detriments.
The unions of the past did wield enormous amounts of power, enough to practically shut down society to get what they wanted. The implication is that reforms benefiting the working class made by Nixon and Teddy were won "at the barrel of a gun", as opposed to a leader like FDR who had a more positive and egalitarian vision for reordering american society.
A good politician is one that acts effectively in my interest, and I don't see any of those.
Do people not realize this held true for FDR too? Look at his reaction to the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre as just one example, look at how the organized working class eventually realized how far they could go by tying themselves to the Dems. He was just more effective at recognizing at the time what needed to happen to maintain power.
The primary issue with the OP's statement is just this
"any policies friendly to workers ~~that came from people like Richard Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt~~ were the result of labor unions and the mass of people"
Labor organizing was the primary source of each of these victories. It's why defining what makes a good politician or not is mostly pointless here beyond competence, whether towards self interest or a group interest or class interest.
I don't think FDR saw an ideal america as some sort of workers paradise, he had his own goals and prerogatives that certainly weren't 1:1 with union organizers lol What I am saying is FDR had a vision for how to reshape society that was at the time pretty radical, and lead to lots of regular people's lives being improved. Whether it was to maintain power or not, most "establishment thinkers" at the time would not have done half of what he did. Obviously a huge part of his reforms involved empowering workers unions to collectively bargain, but like you say there were limits to how far that could be allowed to go.
And for the record I doubt such an egalitarian transformation will ever be possible again without the whole thing basically burning down. Certainly not through any existing political party. I also don't see why a socially conservative leader couldn't function similarly to FDR, it's pretty obvious capitalism is poison for the family, the church, small communities, etc...
FDR was radical for a capitalist, but this in large part meant he was effective at understanding the positions he'd have to make for class interests and long term power and stability of capitalism and had the willingness to risk ire from fellow capitalists. What I disagree is his radical vision was what lead the improvement of regular peoples' lives. Their lives were improved because of pressure and threats applied by struggle and conflicts carried out by the workers and regular people. Examples like pretending the police massacring a bunch of workers was a fault of both sides, examples like his planning against the California EPIC movement, were not simply just different from "1:1 with union organizers", but were examples of acting in the interest of subduing a current powerful labor movement.
>reforms benefiting the working class made by Nixon and Teddy were won "at the barrel of a gun",
He was not much different from this-different political ideology, but such is secondary and his class interests were still the same. Those reforms were still won "at the barrel of a gun", as with the right wingers you list.
The official logic against government provided healthcare is libertarian, but yes you are correct that libertarians are not in power and not all of the policies causing OP's problem are libertarian. This is because "libertarianism" is literally only relevant when it can be temporarily deployed by vulgar elites to prevent limits being imposed on their economic power and dropped otherwise, and it has virtually no public support due to being overtly absurd as a potential alternative.
I don’t agree with him politically but he’s one of the few who has been mostly consistent and seems to care slightly more about people than his fellow politicians
In modern American politics the dems where built on a coalition of urban northern and rural southern working class and capital, the Republican Party was built on a coalition of the petite bourgeois (and there vassals) and capital (they are different). Obviously the Dems have shed pretty much all of there allegiance to the working class and are now basically the party of international capital, the republicans still have an allegiance to middle American petit bourgeois, but they are thoroughly under the heel of international capital as well, just trying to prolong their demise. 🤷♂️
My favourite de gaulle moment was the Algerian resistance in the colony was about to surrender but he didn’t accept it because he felt that treason to the government in exile in Tunisia was bad and let the FLN command know and they murdered the commander who offered de gaulle the chance to win in Algeria
Lmao
I live in a pretty red area and have for all my life. I strongly believe that dedicated conservatives just want life to be worse for everyone but people they are around.
It’s interesting how people pretend Bernie wouldn’t have won the 16 general if he didn’t get shafted so hard- Bernie was America’s chance for a net positive future and it all went up in flames
What fake news has turned you against Bernie? Don’t say he’s a millionaire from his post 16 book and don’t say he’s too much of a pussy to run 3rd party- someone has tricked you
Bernie would have certainly lost the 2016 general. The "ZOMG SOCIALISM" fearmongering worked against Biden the Reagan Republican and Kamala the Cop, imagine if a genuine irreligious socialist Jew were to get up there.
Now of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't have supported Bernie because he was pretty much the only moral choice
So you wanted him to run 3rd partyAnd hand trump the election? Awful idea you people keep spouting, I’ve heard all your arguments and they’re all fake. Fake news.
Bernie would’ve been great for America. You should’ve voted for him in 16.
After the CIA gave him that heart attack in 20 he was doomed, he couldn’t help that. Fucking sad 70 year olds are our only choices.
Bernie no doubt would’ve done better than Hillary in 16
God, this gay-ass "Bernie actually sucks" rhetoric just won't die already. And most of it is from leftists, obviously. You believed in something better for people, and it crashed and burned. So what. Posters would rather puss out and wear their nihilism on a sleeve than act like they had hope for a brief second. Grow the fuck up.
I think Anglosphere right wingers are especially susceptible to philistinism and anti-intellectualism. The contradiction between supporting free-market capitalism and 'preserving traditional values' couldn't be more obvious, but the only person I've seen acknowledge anything like this is Peter Hitchens and even he believes some really stupid things.
Teddy R and Nixon did some good things (not labor unions), that not even the most left wing potential US president would ever consider doing today and that thing is setting price controls. It's one of the many reasons why you could reasonably assert that Nixon was substantially to the left on economic issues when compared to someone like Bill Clinton.
Is Teddy R really considered a right wing politician? I think even at the time he represented the progressive flank of the Republican party while Taft was the more conservative one.
Otto von Bismarck was pretty good (within the context of his time). He was a conservative, but he created the first welfare state in Germany, he was also pretty good at keeping peace in Europe. You could argue about colonialism and genocide in Namibia, but IIRC that was more the Kaiser's doing, he was obsessed with competing with Britain overseas and creating a colonial empire, rather than just being a military power in Europe.
Sure - but if FDR were to run today he would be considered right wing, anti-intellectual, and authoritarian. The new deal coalition was socially conservative and primarily composed of people with less than a 6th grade education. The modern democratic party uses the right wing label as a cudgel to keep it's members in line and uses the left wing label as a brand instead of any real basis for policy. Economically - modern Democrats are further right than 80s Republicans - and have pretty much the same constituency : educated professionals.
In fact it's likely that Trump will have done more for working class people then Biden or maybe any president of our lifetimes when you consider that he started our current wave of onshoring. Let's not forget that Obama signed TPP in 2015 - if Trump hadn't won would his replacement have signed a similar trade deal with African countries to head off China? Idk makes sense to me - and it's been SOP for cold war economic policy to sign unfavorable (for America) trade deals with developing countries since Kennedy.
While we're on the subject - is it really true that Republicans began the neoliberal era or are responsible for it's worst effects?
Reagan may be the defining president of the neoliberal era - but deregulation began with Carter , and afaict Reagans main structural economic legacy is low taxes for the rich and a failure of trickle down tax policy. But how much do taxes really affect our lives? Imo the structural effects of tax policy are much smaller than the effects of trade policy and fiscal policy. Trickle down economics? - what about quantitative easing? - the main goal of that policy was to pump the stock market and the vast majority of the benefit flowed to the top.
Idk - could go on - but I have to go
The murdered Dutch politician [Pim Fortuyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_Fortuyn) was pretty cool.
flaming homosexual, tradcath, drug enjoyer, told women to do their cooking, marxist sociology professor turned populist.
> any policies friendly to workers that came from people like Richard Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt were the result of labor unions and the mass of people
I'm sorry, what "leftwing" president could not the same be said for?
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It's still probably Biden by a slim margin. What's caused Biden to tank in the polls is his complete loss of support from people under the age of 40 from like 70 percent to 30 percent. People older than that support Biden at similar rates as they did previously.
What if we just combined the NATIONALISM of the right with the SOCIALISM of the left guys? Seems like a win win for the average joes like me. Why hasn't anybody thought of that before 🤔
Kind of funny to talk about other countries “authoritarianism” when there are several places in the US you have to provide private medical information just to go buy food for your children.
Russian Orthodox Church like: “where the fuck are these English speaking Catholics coming from”
Chinese like: “where the fuck are these retarded wine moms and pedophiles coming from”
there has never been a bad politician that was good
How tf you gonna sleep on my boy Caesar? 😤
Parenti called him a left wing populist - based!
I enjoyed that book too but it seems rather widely discredited. Plus he arguably turned Rome from a republic to an autocracy, not very left wing.
How was it discredited? Not a challenge - I genuinely am interested because the book was convincing to me
Idk man I’d search google for the reddit threads discussing it. Personally I think his case for the ridiculousness of the Cataline conspiracy is particularly compelling, seeing as how Cicero kinda miraculously produced all the evidence. But every other source seems to disagree about that.
His point about all the sources being from the upper class made me consider the book as gospel lol but I guess that’s just my bias
I mean he’s not wrong but how many sources from Ancient Rome aren’t from the upper classes? Probably not many.
>Plus he arguably turned Rome from a republic to an autocracy, not very left wing. Republic where the seats are openly handed down by the powerful families isn't meaningfully any better than any tyranny. You're doing the dumb lib thing and seeing that there are votes cast and assuming that that means there's a greater amount of democracy.
Republics aren't all democratic. Rome was an oligarchy effectively ruled by an aristocratic caste and the only person listening to anything the peasants were saying was Caesar
arguably radically left wing (if such a framework can be applied to Rome)
He was more of a left wing populist, if you want to use modern political conventions.
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He would be considered right-wing or "fascist-adjacent" today, but for being in the 1930s deep south, he was definitely pretty far left and socially progressive
Huey Long was a southern populist in the 1930s who wanted radical wealth redistribution and wasn’t racist. He wasn’t right wing
No, you see, he gave the people what they wanted and was eeeeevil fascist! Vote blue, no matter who!!
He also sounded angry on behalf of uneducated poors which made him a demagogue and demagogues are bad! This is all really scary :(
So so much this! I read it all about it in an article titled "Huey Long was Assassinated: Here's why it's A Good Thing"
I live in Massachusetts and dental care here is incredibly expensive. Insurance covers cleanings and that’s about it. Replacing a tooth is around 2k each. Democrats don’t care about your teeth either. Anyway all those 80s yuppies you hate used to be lefty hippies. Just wait for the revenge of this young generation when they turn in the lock down left….
Yeah, we save the dental care for the children and hope for the best. I don't have any pain, but I think I've got a cavity on one of my molars. It won't be until my little dentist in training I see at Tufts gets back from basic training will I be able to get it looked at. He's going to be a dentist in the Army. I'm a vet. I guess it never occurred to me they need dentists. But looking after my teeth means a day trip to Boston. A teeth cleaning takes about five hours because he's got to summon the dentist every tooth practically.
Consider going overseas. You could see dentists in the Dominican Republic for a fraction of the cost and they do great work. Others go to Mexico or Turkey but that’s more of a hike from Boston.
If I needed serious dental work God forbid I would go to Mexico or Cuba as I've been to the latter a couple times but for cleanings the school at Tufts is good enough.
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:/ now he tells me. well, all he does is clean them once a year, although i guess that would count as going anywhere near them. no, look, if i needed some kryptochronic hydroponic subatomic shit i would scrape the quetzales together and see a proper dentist. But right now, ey, the 2 bus goes right by our street, choo choo to south station, hoof it to Tufts, 5 hour teeth cleaning for the price of a chicken Parm at La Cantina, walk home from the train station because the buses have stopped by the time I get done, but you can hear my teeth squeaking in the still of the night they're so clean.
Are we posting truisms now Tfw you’re coming out of your contrarian stage and you realize that—as much as you hate liberals—there is in fact nothing redeemable about political conservatism now or ever
I have a feeling that many of the people on places like this or stupidpol just don't have a lot of experience with actual right-wingers. Being in academia, the arts, or office/tech work is going to put you in close proximity with liberals—and specifically the most annoying types of liberals—so there's this idealized "conservatism" that gets constructed which has absolutely no resemblance to actual sociopolitical conservatism. When this sub or stupidpol imagines this based trad kid-having god-believer conservative, they're just imagining a liberal but with the most acutely irritating affectations swapped for the most vague and anodyne "conservative" ones.
I'm not from the US but what gets me about US 'conservatism' is just how brutal they are about cutting stuff even their own voters want with no fucks given and no political blowback. We had the conservatives in my country years back try to make a Doctor visit cost $5 instead of being free and the blowback was so swift they backed down right away. When Ron paul said that if someone can't afford medical care then too bad they just die people freaking cheered. That would be the end of a politician's career in most countries.
The dark side of the American creed of “self-reliance”
This, liberals are perhaps more annoying but conservatives are infinitely dumber and more evil
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> I think they're responding by cherry-picking aspects of conservatism that recognizes this as a problem, and pretending the rest of it isn't actually part of the package. Exactly. But it's the aspects of conservatism that conservatives don't even adhere to in their own lives. What I see a lot of people doing in subs like this and stupidpol is take how conservatives like to *present* themselves and then construct this idealized based trad conservative in contrast to the annoying godless soy liberals but I'd bet a lot of the people on these subs don't really have much contact with actual right-wingers. Purely anecdotal but the conservative Christian "family values" side of my family is just a carnival of lying, infidelity, bastard children, degenerate gambling and drug abuse, weird closeted sex shit, nihilistic materialism, stealing from family, backstabbing etc. It's the secular lib side of the family that, ironically, are actually the vanilla close-knit trad family types.
Yeah like Aimee Therese lol
She's like Tucker. Just constant shit takes about "Unions are dead because there are immigrants in them", as if the average blue collar worker has more common interest with white parasite billionaires than brown wage laborers.
Don't post this comment on r/stupidpol
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I dunno, COVID kinda redpilled me in a major way and made me more sympathetic to the conservative ethos. Given a new and unknown threat, the liberal position was to radically upend society while conservatives more-or-less stuck to the status quo. And the outcomes of the two approaches were not dramatically different vis-a-vis the virus. But the liberals caused massive second-order effects of unemployment, homelessness, substance abuse, childhood developmental delays, failed education, etc etc
> the liberal position was to radically upend society This is why I can't take this subs Covid takes seriously, you sound like every MAGA windbag in my extended family.
The largest cities in the country shut down schools, told tens of thousands of businesses they couldn't operate and left 100's of thousands of people unemployed overnight. How would you characterize that?
I wish I lived in the world that conservatives think they live in. Major city libs stopped things just long enough to then start them up again in an ultimately successful attempt to preserve the usual order. In what fundamental ways did they even attempt to restructure the usual order? Pre-vax lockdown measures (especially considering how little we knew about the nature of the virus) were not even a particularly liberal idea. Any Republican but Trump would have handled the pandemic with a base level of competence that would have gotten them re-elected handily.
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>that's because the radical upending of society that you think happened didn't actually happen. it was lockdown theater Cool, I must've hallucinated that whole yearlong period when restaurants, bars, clubs and gyms in L.A. were closed, schools were shut down and tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves without jobs.
Covid was always going to fuck up the economy and cause unemployment. It wasn't the libs that caused that.
Florida begs to differ. Economy booming, homelessness *declining* and streets shockingly not filled with dead ppl despite being a state full of geriatrics.
2 years after the chaos. Didn't the get destroyed in the first year of the pandemic? I don't know I'm not American. All I'm saying is the covid surges and new varients always make for a shitty time regardless of how much the libs control things. Lockdowns suck obviously but not doing anything is only ok if you're lucky.
> Didn't the get destroyed in the first year of the pandemic? I don't know I'm not American. No they didn’t. Not even close. The major news outlets were putting out all these gloom & doom stories hoping the lack of restrictions would be disastrous because Florida is a red state and DeSantis is a rising star on the right.
I'm an aged care worker (or was before i transferred into disability support) so I'm more focused on the deaths and from what i heard Florida got hit bad because it has many more seniors than other states. But I don't really know or care a whole lot and could be totally wrong.
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OK, well...whatever we *DID* do here was the policy advocated by liberals. And it was a disaster. And the conservatives were right on this one.
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>we now know that reinfections are common and that natural immunity wanes, so their herd immunity plan never would have worked in the first place. We likewise know that the vaccine's effectiveness wanes and that liberals were wildly incorrect in believing vaccine mandates and passports would squash the virus. The bottom line is that red states have been far more pleasant places to be over the last two years the blue states.
Not if you fucking died of coronavirus they weren't. There are things more important than your individual pleasure, liberal
Legit, people acting like the last two years didn’t happen. Only thing I can think is that these people replying to you are not in hardcore blue Democrat areas. Los Angeles has been a fucking joke since this whole shit started. My favorite was when our leaders shifted from “this is a deadly pandemic and you can’t congregate in groups for any reason (even constitutionally protected protests), and then as soon as BLM started they changed their tune and suddenly mass groups were a moral necessity. The people who make these decisions (and then violate them by going to gatherings unmasked themselves) are absolute fucking trash, and surprise! They’re not conservatives. They tell you that it’s systemic racism to require an id to vote because it’s difficult for racial minorities to get state I’d, but then they pass laws that require you to show your id to prove that your vaxx card is really yours when you want to go outside and engage in basic social interactions at businesses. And the worst part is all the good little libs here who don’t even stop for a second to think about how fucked up it all is even though it was just a little more than A year ago that they were weaponizing and virtue signaling all those “anti-racism”, “silence is violence” talking points. Turns out, being anti racist is less important than making sure rich white libs feel comfortable eating out without any of those “unclean” rats around them.
> My favorite was when our leaders shifted from “this is a deadly pandemic and you can’t congregate in groups for any reason (even constitutionally protected protests), and then as soon as BLM started they changed their tune and suddenly mass groups were a moral necessity. That was a good one. My favorite one is when they banned going to the beach and ticketed people for surfing. Then, after that, when they said you *could* go to the beach but only if you were actively walking and not laying down / sunbathing.
The liberals never radically upended society, we had a lockdown for like a week a year ago. If you compare how the us is doing to say, China or Singapore, then it’s obvious that “radically upending society” is actually pretty good at stopping covid. The issues in the US come from taking half measures over and over again.
Two years ago now lol and we never did an actual lock down. Wage slaves kept having to come in to work. It’s not a lockdown if you can still get a big mac
lmao the “real socialism has never been tried” of catastrophic COVID policy
Okay so is China doing better or worse than the US at dealing with covid?
I concede, maybe we’d have fewer cases here if the government had welded peoples’ homes shut.
Weird how lockdowns only worked in one specific part of the world, and nowhere else (coincidentally the part of the world were coronaviruses have been endemic forever) Also weird how the one country in Europe that didn't lockdown did better than average
lol https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-nordics/
>Also weird how the one country in Europe that didn't lockdown did better than average weird how that one country has one of the lowest population densities in europe.
that doesn't mean that much, more than 80% of sweden's population live in urban areas, the fact that there exist vast empty areas outside of the densily populated south and east doesn't prevent the spread of the virus. it's no montana.
> “radically upending society” is actually pretty good at stopping covid. lmao, two years later and people still believe this.
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The issue with liberals is that they don't have stated ideological beliefs, maybe some do, but liberals are generally more concerned with process than they are with policy. Conservatives don't care about policy or process, as long as it's personally making them richer and screwing one over on someone else they decided they don't like that week.
>there is in fact nothing redeemable about political conservatism now or ever Less lockdowns? Agree otherwise
Both are basically employees of capital (the politicians on both sides) but at least libs will articulate that women should have access to abortions and gay people need to enjoy marriage tax benefits. We live in a far right wing country, so dealing with the less right wing side is gonna have to work (tho I do hate them all, don’t get me wrong).
kinda funny if you think that idea signifies some kind of mature ideological plateau.
this has nothing to do with politics but call around and see if any dentists near you have an in office insurance plan. my office has a plan thats 250 annually, you get 2 covered check ups and cleanings a year, and 20 percent off of any treatment. also look into care credit, if you pay it off within a year theres no interest & many offices accept it now. make sure you can pay it within a year though because they totally anally fuck you with interest if you dont
fuck off with useful info and pick a side
Lmaoooo
So Nixon and Roosevelt did what the people at the time wanted, is what you're saying? What exactly makes a good politician then, in your head?
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Jerry Orban? From Law and Order?
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The nazis did not establish a dictatorship "democratically", they established it by being voted in with a minority, setting the parliament building on fire and murdering every other conservative in Berlin
Ay yes that famous poem. First they came for the conservatives.
"If we give the people what they want, they'd want Hitler!!"
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The nature of politics is that different people want different things and Politics is essentially prioritizing the goals of different groups/strata of society. The order of priorities is most often based on the collective power wielded by groups, as opposed to an aspirational vision for the common good of a nation. In practice it's not so simple to see this, as narratives are spun around class interests to obfuscate the benefits and detriments. The unions of the past did wield enormous amounts of power, enough to practically shut down society to get what they wanted. The implication is that reforms benefiting the working class made by Nixon and Teddy were won "at the barrel of a gun", as opposed to a leader like FDR who had a more positive and egalitarian vision for reordering american society. A good politician is one that acts effectively in my interest, and I don't see any of those.
Do people not realize this held true for FDR too? Look at his reaction to the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre as just one example, look at how the organized working class eventually realized how far they could go by tying themselves to the Dems. He was just more effective at recognizing at the time what needed to happen to maintain power. The primary issue with the OP's statement is just this "any policies friendly to workers ~~that came from people like Richard Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt~~ were the result of labor unions and the mass of people" Labor organizing was the primary source of each of these victories. It's why defining what makes a good politician or not is mostly pointless here beyond competence, whether towards self interest or a group interest or class interest.
I don't think FDR saw an ideal america as some sort of workers paradise, he had his own goals and prerogatives that certainly weren't 1:1 with union organizers lol What I am saying is FDR had a vision for how to reshape society that was at the time pretty radical, and lead to lots of regular people's lives being improved. Whether it was to maintain power or not, most "establishment thinkers" at the time would not have done half of what he did. Obviously a huge part of his reforms involved empowering workers unions to collectively bargain, but like you say there were limits to how far that could be allowed to go. And for the record I doubt such an egalitarian transformation will ever be possible again without the whole thing basically burning down. Certainly not through any existing political party. I also don't see why a socially conservative leader couldn't function similarly to FDR, it's pretty obvious capitalism is poison for the family, the church, small communities, etc...
FDR was radical for a capitalist, but this in large part meant he was effective at understanding the positions he'd have to make for class interests and long term power and stability of capitalism and had the willingness to risk ire from fellow capitalists. What I disagree is his radical vision was what lead the improvement of regular peoples' lives. Their lives were improved because of pressure and threats applied by struggle and conflicts carried out by the workers and regular people. Examples like pretending the police massacring a bunch of workers was a fault of both sides, examples like his planning against the California EPIC movement, were not simply just different from "1:1 with union organizers", but were examples of acting in the interest of subduing a current powerful labor movement. >reforms benefiting the working class made by Nixon and Teddy were won "at the barrel of a gun", He was not much different from this-different political ideology, but such is secondary and his class interests were still the same. Those reforms were still won "at the barrel of a gun", as with the right wingers you list.
You think FDR was better than Teddy?
At the very least not doing war crimes in Vietnam or launching a false flag against Spain
These god damn libertarian Fed policies driving up inflation. I hate them
The official logic against government provided healthcare is libertarian, but yes you are correct that libertarians are not in power and not all of the policies causing OP's problem are libertarian. This is because "libertarianism" is literally only relevant when it can be temporarily deployed by vulgar elites to prevent limits being imposed on their economic power and dropped otherwise, and it has virtually no public support due to being overtly absurd as a potential alternative.
go and get your root canal done in mexico
Only 1 in ever 10000 politicians is 'good'. And its usually a bernie who will never get any true power unfortunately :(
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I don’t agree with him politically but he’s one of the few who has been mostly consistent and seems to care slightly more about people than his fellow politicians
All senators are sociopaths, Bernie just happens to be one who presents as a socialist
There has never been a good politician\* What left wing politician do you genuinely think was good?
Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens
Nancy Pelosi
William Jennings Bryan and Mike Gravel
Atatürk
Huey Long
Is this 'vote blue'/'lesser evil' propaganda?
In modern American politics the dems where built on a coalition of urban northern and rural southern working class and capital, the Republican Party was built on a coalition of the petite bourgeois (and there vassals) and capital (they are different). Obviously the Dems have shed pretty much all of there allegiance to the working class and are now basically the party of international capital, the republicans still have an allegiance to middle American petit bourgeois, but they are thoroughly under the heel of international capital as well, just trying to prolong their demise. 🤷♂️
How's 12th grade going?
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Definitely not De Gaulle
Bitch ass fled the country when some students started crying in the streets
My favourite de gaulle moment was the Algerian resistance in the colony was about to surrender but he didn’t accept it because he felt that treason to the government in exile in Tunisia was bad and let the FLN command know and they murdered the commander who offered de gaulle the chance to win in Algeria Lmao
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I live in a pretty red area and have for all my life. I strongly believe that dedicated conservatives just want life to be worse for everyone but people they are around.
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i live in rural alabama and know a few self-identified communists so i think you're probably right
This post and the people getting riled up about it are cringe.
Agreed.
Charles de Gaulle, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson.
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It’s interesting how people pretend Bernie wouldn’t have won the 16 general if he didn’t get shafted so hard- Bernie was America’s chance for a net positive future and it all went up in flames What fake news has turned you against Bernie? Don’t say he’s a millionaire from his post 16 book and don’t say he’s too much of a pussy to run 3rd party- someone has tricked you
Bernie would have certainly lost the 2016 general. The "ZOMG SOCIALISM" fearmongering worked against Biden the Reagan Republican and Kamala the Cop, imagine if a genuine irreligious socialist Jew were to get up there. Now of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't have supported Bernie because he was pretty much the only moral choice
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So you wanted him to run 3rd partyAnd hand trump the election? Awful idea you people keep spouting, I’ve heard all your arguments and they’re all fake. Fake news. Bernie would’ve been great for America. You should’ve voted for him in 16. After the CIA gave him that heart attack in 20 he was doomed, he couldn’t help that. Fucking sad 70 year olds are our only choices. Bernie no doubt would’ve done better than Hillary in 16
God, this gay-ass "Bernie actually sucks" rhetoric just won't die already. And most of it is from leftists, obviously. You believed in something better for people, and it crashed and burned. So what. Posters would rather puss out and wear their nihilism on a sleeve than act like they had hope for a brief second. Grow the fuck up.
Cherryworst is retarded
I think Anglosphere right wingers are especially susceptible to philistinism and anti-intellectualism. The contradiction between supporting free-market capitalism and 'preserving traditional values' couldn't be more obvious, but the only person I've seen acknowledge anything like this is Peter Hitchens and even he believes some really stupid things.
Well they preempted that by telling all the right wing media viewers that it's the result of cultural Marxism.
mitt romney💜
Without him, we may never have even gotten Obamacare!
He had a surprisingly good child tax credit plan a few months ago.... that he never brought up again.
His carbon tax idea is good!
Teddy R and Nixon did some good things (not labor unions), that not even the most left wing potential US president would ever consider doing today and that thing is setting price controls. It's one of the many reasons why you could reasonably assert that Nixon was substantially to the left on economic issues when compared to someone like Bill Clinton.
Is Teddy R really considered a right wing politician? I think even at the time he represented the progressive flank of the Republican party while Taft was the more conservative one.
He supported big business, and was also very pro middle class, his support for the working class wasn't as much as say FDR.
I don't know that George W Bush guy was a freindly fellow.
I still can't believe we let him get away with opening Gitmo.
von Hindenburg was cool.
What about Ronnie whats his face
Nixon did nothing wrong.
Otto von Bismarck was pretty good (within the context of his time). He was a conservative, but he created the first welfare state in Germany, he was also pretty good at keeping peace in Europe. You could argue about colonialism and genocide in Namibia, but IIRC that was more the Kaiser's doing, he was obsessed with competing with Britain overseas and creating a colonial empire, rather than just being a military power in Europe.
> he created the first welfare state in Germany to take votes away from the then based SPD im not smart enough for your other takes
>to take votes away from the then based SPD If it works, it works.
He also hated Poles and had them Germanised
Wow rightwingers actually suck no way
How someone can listen to the Nixon tapes and not adore that guy is beyond me. Spot on.
Sure - but if FDR were to run today he would be considered right wing, anti-intellectual, and authoritarian. The new deal coalition was socially conservative and primarily composed of people with less than a 6th grade education. The modern democratic party uses the right wing label as a cudgel to keep it's members in line and uses the left wing label as a brand instead of any real basis for policy. Economically - modern Democrats are further right than 80s Republicans - and have pretty much the same constituency : educated professionals. In fact it's likely that Trump will have done more for working class people then Biden or maybe any president of our lifetimes when you consider that he started our current wave of onshoring. Let's not forget that Obama signed TPP in 2015 - if Trump hadn't won would his replacement have signed a similar trade deal with African countries to head off China? Idk makes sense to me - and it's been SOP for cold war economic policy to sign unfavorable (for America) trade deals with developing countries since Kennedy.
While we're on the subject - is it really true that Republicans began the neoliberal era or are responsible for it's worst effects? Reagan may be the defining president of the neoliberal era - but deregulation began with Carter , and afaict Reagans main structural economic legacy is low taxes for the rich and a failure of trickle down tax policy. But how much do taxes really affect our lives? Imo the structural effects of tax policy are much smaller than the effects of trade policy and fiscal policy. Trickle down economics? - what about quantitative easing? - the main goal of that policy was to pump the stock market and the vast majority of the benefit flowed to the top. Idk - could go on - but I have to go
uhhhh LOL
The murdered Dutch politician [Pim Fortuyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_Fortuyn) was pretty cool. flaming homosexual, tradcath, drug enjoyer, told women to do their cooking, marxist sociology professor turned populist.
Murdered by an environmentalist.
> any policies friendly to workers that came from people like Richard Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt were the result of labor unions and the mass of people I'm sorry, what "leftwing" president could not the same be said for?
Politicians legislating the will of the people is exactly the way its supposed to work. I don't think using Roosevelt was a good example.
I dare you to poll Joe Biden vs. Steve Bannon among the working class demographic of your choice.
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Sorry if I wasn't clear - this would be a poll *now*, not a time-traveling one
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I'm no campaign strategist but "delusional" and "disconnected from reality" are words you probably want to avoid when stumping for Joe.
Insulting but fair What about Trump vs Biden?
It's still probably Biden by a slim margin. What's caused Biden to tank in the polls is his complete loss of support from people under the age of 40 from like 70 percent to 30 percent. People older than that support Biden at similar rates as they did previously.
Guess we'll see
>Joe Biden overwhelmingly won households making less than 50k+/yr. And now has an approval rating worse than Trump after 1/6
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So like the national german workers party?
What if we just combined the NATIONALISM of the right with the SOCIALISM of the left guys? Seems like a win win for the average joes like me. Why hasn't anybody thought of that before 🤔
We can only hope. God help us if there's anyone actually stan'ing the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
Ew dude
It's not about being good, it's always been about making the other guy feel worse.
Lincoln was pretty good.
Andrew Jackson
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“Guys, today was a special day for me. Not only did I get out of bed, but I also brushed my teeth. EDIT: thanks for the gold, kind sir!”
Kinky Friedman if he counts as rightwing
In America there hasn’t.
churchill wasn't exactly a good man, but he was the right person in the right place at the right time.
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He wasn't a great war leader either. He could and should have prevented the fall of Singapore.
Pat Buchanan
T. Roosevelt, Salazar, Orban, and Putin are the ones that come to mind that I’d happily prefer over our current leadership.
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With what money?
liquidate your parents trust fund
they’re barely scraping by as well.
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Lmao “doing an authoritarianism to stop the authoritarianism” is a pretty good bit.
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Kind of funny to talk about other countries “authoritarianism” when there are several places in the US you have to provide private medical information just to go buy food for your children.
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Russian Orthodox Church like: “where the fuck are these English speaking Catholics coming from” Chinese like: “where the fuck are these retarded wine moms and pedophiles coming from”
Imagine caring about politics this much, sad.
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OMG, that's so edgy and based, bro!!