(12-22-2018, 05:34 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: The party of Lincoln in a modern sense is still very much alive on the Republican side as well as most of American culture these days. You don't represent the views of American culture. You represent the views of blue culture. Now, as an American who understand that, all I can say is good luck making it through the upcoming years as more and more people come to realize that the blues ain't all that American at the core and their leadership ain't all that interested in American point of views or American beliefs or American laws and so forth. Like I said, you're a dead man as far I'm concerned and what happens to you and your so called liberal ilk makes no difference to me personally. I've never recognized (Eric the Green) as an American liberal. Tolerance like everything else only extends so far. As far as American tolerance, you aren't even close to being viewed as borderline. So, you)Eric the Green are) pretty much screwed at this point. One more American minded judge is all we need to change things for the better as far as Americans go and make things and make matters even worse for blues who view themselves as the rulers of their own domains, so to speak.
It may be ironic, but FDR practically took over Abraham Lincoln during World War II as an ideal. FDR found Lincoln the ideal expression of America's desire to deliver the slaves of Hitlerland and Tojoland from subjection. FDR used the rhetoric of Lincoln against the Axis power with even greater vehemence because the Axis powers had no trace of the gentlemanly qualities of the Confederates. After all, the Confederacy had only one vice that Lincoln eventually chose to extinguish: chattel slavery. Slavery in a Nazi concentration camp was far worse than anything that a slave could have endured on a plantation. During the Second World War, German POWs under American custody got Lincoln as an antithesis of Hitler. Both came from modest backgrounds and led their countries through dangerous times.
We "Blues" as a rule admire Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, FDR was not as merciful to Nazis as Lincoln was to the slave-owning planters who lost the American Civil War. Maybe people must show more tolerance of old evils that have long been tolerated out of political necessity than to those who bring evil to the world as did Hitler and Tojo. The worst that the Confederacy did was Andersonville, and for that its commandant would die with a rope around his neck. By the way -- Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump are two of the most dissimilar Presidents that we have ever had. I look at the deeds of Donald Trump and ask whether Lincoln would have done the same.
Liberalism includes everything from the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment (free enterprise instead of the feudal rights of an elite to a sure profit predicated upon duties of the masses to the feudal elites in return for the privilege of survival, denial of any divine right of kings, and basic rights as enumerated in the American Bill of Rights and the French Declarations of the Rights of Man) to social democracy that extends liberalism to the ideal of equal opportunity to its fullest. "Liberalism" excludes anything still feudal (like Saudi Arabia), fascist, or Communist, all fair exclusions from liberalism. Ba'athism under Saddam Hussein or either Assad and the theocratic rule of either Iran or ISIS count as fascist in my set of definitions as does the KKK or Nazism.
Liberalism is not particularly American. I have more in common with a Japanese or Indian liberal than I have in common with an American fascist. Indeed I would sell out the American fascist war criminals to liberal Japanese or liberal Indian occupiers with no hesitation. I'm as anti-crime as I can be, and I cannot imagine worse crimes than war crimes... and I would expect American fascists to become war criminals. If I could say that there is nothing wrong with Saddam Hussein that a well-tied rope and a seven-foot drop couldn't solve, I would say the same of any American who commits such crimes. Liberalism asserts the core values of freedom of thought and expression, fair and competitive elections as the means of constituting government, the right to a fair trial to be judged by an independent judiciary, the abolition of whatever remaining feudal rights and duties, gender equity, ethnic equality, rule of law, and the absence of barbarous punishments. Liberalism is the expression of humanism (all in all, the only viable ideology) .
Decent people do not praise a political system that they believe 'screws' people. We have seen more than enough compromise of the American political heritage just to promote some right-wing agenda. We have seen signs of government by corporate lobbyist, a novel form of dictatorship that has yet to have a fancy Greek name for it. We have seen a President act more like a despot than any prior President has ever acted. Our President does not understand 240 years of the American political heritage and holds much of it in contempt.
It may be ironic that I could call upon a phrase that an awful President used to describe his ideal for America: a "return to normalcy". That was Warren Gamaliel Harding, still regarded as one of the worst Presidents in American history nearly a century later and even the most corrupt until Donald Trump. We can use a President who has the skill set of Ronald Reagan and the temperament of Eisenhower. We had such a President, but he is Barack Obama. If you dislike Obama it is for his beliefs and not for having the characteristics of two Presidents that most conservatives recognize with Eisenhower or Reagan.
There is more to government than taking the shaft to political opponents, which is precisely what Commies, fascists, and theocrats do. If you endorse such, then you are anything but a liberal. We need 'normalcy' again, even if such is not a valid word in the English language.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.