01-28-2017, 11:24 AM
(01-27-2017, 11:53 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-27-2017, 10:02 PM)taramarie Wrote:(01-27-2017, 09:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The John Birch Society, long considered extreme and ludicrous to conservatives, has stayed as far to the Right as possible without delving into calls for genocide (including enslavement or extermination) except perhaps against Communists. The Republican Party has gone so far to the Right that it and the Birch Society are now hard to distinguish.
I have heard that both left and right wing have become more extreme over the years. Not sure if that is true or not.
There is certainly less willingness to compromise. Yes, prejudice that was accepted as normal in FDR's time would generate outrage today. The civil rights and women's movements since the Awakening reflect vastly different expectations among the modern blue population. Aspects of red culture have been dragged in the direction of equality quite some distance. Given how stubborn and irrational cultures can act, it shouldn't be surprising that they are digging in and refusing to budge for a time. In this, I'm not speaking only of the red culture. The blue belief in equality is stubborn too.
What this fails to distinguish is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. It has always been the red culture that champions equality of opportunity; it was the Democrats who fought the civil rights movement most strongly when that was what the civil rights movement meant.
Once they had lost on the civil rights movement, the blue culture, unable to comprehend the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome, focused on forcing outcomes to be the same irrespective of fairness from an individual standpoint. LBJ, who like many on the left truly believed that blacks were fundamentally inferior to whites, redefined affirmative action to mean discrimination against whites, because he thought that without favored treatment, blacks could never attain equality.
This is, of course, fought by the red culture, which believes that all races are fully capable of achieving equality on their own, given the opportunity, and should do so.