01-01-2020, 09:40 AM
(12-31-2019, 06:47 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-14-2019, 12:10 AM)Tina89 Wrote: If 50% of the US is Fascist and 50% is Communist then who will speak up for freedom?
Thing is, we are not. We just slap the labels around freely and pretend. Oh, there are some real racists out there, and tribal thinkers who think America should be for white male evangelicals. Not the same thing.
I am definitely on the Left on almost all economic issues because the Right has nothing to offer me but misery -- work and pay, work and pay, and never enjoy either their work and simply get fleeced without a choice. It is nothing more than responsibility toward people who have no responsibility except to themselves, which is suffering. As Lincoln put it, "as I would not be a slave I would not be a master". I would not be a peon, so I do not treat others as peons or excuse others for treating people as such. I am a conservative on educational content, child protection, and law and order. There are basic truths that everyone must learn, my expression of which is redundant, and a full education improves a person to be a solid participant willing to make personal sacrifices to create a better world. Children are precious or else we are a sick society, and law and order is the first civil right without which the others are meaningless. The alternative to sane law and order is lynchings and terror; just think of the bombing of the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham or the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr -- both lawless deeds.
It could be that 20% of Americans are totalitarian right-wingers, another 20% are totalitarian left-wingers, 10% on each side are potential fellow travelers of extremists, and those in the middle are the potential zone of contention. In my case I recognize the validity of tradition, but in a country as diverse as ours I am not going to judge one tradition more valid because it is my own. Even in cuisine, my taste in food does not match my ethnic origins. English and German cuisine are both awful. Many of us fail to recognize the glory that one can get by picking and choosing between different cultures.
...I am not sure that the GOP has a continuing lock on the evangelical vote. First of all, there are evangelical blacks, and they are still on the political Left despite a very conservative culture. Second, most of the white evangelical Christians are converts who found religious dogma that fit their conservative values on family relationships (male supremacy) and economics along with disdain for modernity in culture and science. (If people don't believe that even the first chapters of Genesis are unqualified truth, then people can justify anything -- to which I say that atheists and agnostics can have well-developed moral values, and people can do horrible things i the Name of God).
The kids of such people grew up with Bible verses informing them of all things, and many can take the Bible seriously enough to recognize that Jesus did not organize a wealth cult; He challenged the wealth cult of the Pharisees and got lynched for that. Furthermore, those kids got contact with the kids who seemed to have more fun but were hardly immoral... the children of the Religious Right may recognize the need for more kindness toward those that a harsh plutocracy exploits and abandons than do their parents.
In any event, practically all well-educated Americans have read Nineteen Eighty-Four and have learned a few things about the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and hold anything associated with them as suspect until proved innocuous. (OK, there is nothing wrong with expressways and anti-smoking programs, and the Marxists are right about the working class as the measure of economic development. KZ-lager and the Gulag, and propaganda that excludes any chance of challenge? No way! I once told a neo-Nazi who blamed the Jews for everything wrong in the world that if I had to choose between being a Jew and a Nazi, I would be a Jew because such would neither compromise my morals nor my culture. On the other hand, if I believe in a Powerful and Just God, maybe God can decide which theological Truth is His... and he might become identical with those that one abused, exploited, robbed, or killed. The ultimate justice for a KKK terrorist is to find that God is black, and for a Nazi such might be that God is a Jew. Going a bit further, Osama bin Laden may have found that God is an American, and Slobodan Milosevich and Baruch Goldstein [shot up a mosque] found out a bit late that God is Allah and that Muhammad is the Greatest of His Prophets). Because Nazis and mobsters are not people of justice, I do not expect God to judge me harshly for rhetoric against Nazis and other gangsters.
But Donald Trump has expressed his values well when he said "I love low-information voters" without recognizing a problem in such.
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.