The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Eric the Green]

(07-26-2020, 04:51 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-26-2020, 04:05 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I don't represent the old Marxist laden Democratic values.

No one does.  This is a straw man creation created mostly from the red.  They cannot argue with the blue values, so they make up a perspective they can argue with.  I don't recognize myself or any other blue person in them.  You are missing things entirely.

(07-26-2020, 04:05 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I represent traditional American values that have withstood the tests of time. American culture itself is much stronger, much larger and much more powerful than it was back at the turn of the last century. I've been trying to tell you that for the last fifteen years but you don't want to listen.

You seem to be still sticking with Trump.  He stands for corruption, bypassing the Constitutional checks and balances, violence, killing Americans and Trump.  The election is essentially a referendum on how well he has done, and the broad consensus is badly.

Now when you speak for yourself, I have some sympathy.  Some.  The Republican push for small government, shunning science and ignoring progress have in my opinion gone far beyond the point of diminishing returns.  Well, so did the progressive attempt to solve everything by throwing money at it.  The cycles are real.  No matter which extreme you stand on you are apt to see your politicians overdo it.  The leaders of both sides are apt to take the approach that got them power too far.  I anticipate that the time will come again someday when the progressives go too far, but not soon.  Next unraveling, perhaps.  

But if you stand with Trump you are opposing the traditional American values.  A good number of your Americans have recognized this and decided to switch sides for an election or two.  I could see the Lincoln Project putting the conservative voters back together without the racist, elitist or corruption elements.  Such folks would make an honorable opposition, at least after the Democrats go beyond the point of diminishing returns, which they inevitably will.

But if you posture with Trump's violence, ignoring checks and balance and selfishness, that isn't America.  Your calling it American will not make it so.  Other reds have seen it.  I don't think you love reality more than your ideology, so as of yet you have not.  You may choose not to see it.  It is up to you.

I'm not sure if the progressives went too far by throwing money at things. It was something like that, but the old Democrats of the fifties and sixties used to think in terms of wholesale slum clearance and putting up huge housing blocks. They took away community downtown shopping streets according to the idea that people wanted lots of land around the buildings. They built freeways which decimated inner cities. They paved paradise and put up parking lots. They too often thought of themselves as people with power and grand plans. People like Robert Moses and Mayor Daley. They over-did it, but more correctly, they did it without much refinement, sensitivity or humility. It's called hubris.

In another sense, they did not go far enough. The war on poverty was a good war. It started a process of creating a middle class of all races. However, just as it was starting, LBJ decided to make his hubristic power play and tried to impose his will on another country half way around the world and at the same time remake American society wholesale, without even raising taxes. It was spend, but no tax, or whatever you have called it. The war on poverty stalled; riots broke out. People of all races resisted his deadly, unjust, hopeless and unnecessary foreign war, and unrest spread over the land. LBJ bowed out and several Lichtman Keys turned. The progressives never got power again until today. For sure, they lost the South with their policies and achievements toward racial justice and a great society, and that was a positive Lichtman Key, but they also lost the confidence of many young people and many others in swing states who weren't racists but who bought Nixon's pledge to end the war and bring us together in 1968. The election was close, but the tide turned, and it never turned back. It was a redefining election in the sense of which parties represent which policies and which regions. The blueprints for today's red states and blue states were laid out.

Reaganomics in 1980 was never necessary or justified. But it appealed to the mood of the times of distrust of government. Johnson and Nixon had betrayed that trust. The end of the line of this mood is Trump. Many now feel betrayed by him, and it's a chance for the progressives to take another shot. Will they overdo it? Probably. But maybe not in the way their opponents will say. Progress has to be smart. And it has to know what is sustainable, and what is merely based on limitless ambition for power. It needs to keep its eye on the prize, and not be distracted by hopeless projects based on the delusions of the past.