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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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This seems to me to ignore all the times the left loses. The right wants to conserve how things are because what worked in the past and especially in a nation as successful as America is likely to work in the future. The left is like a scientist who runs a 1000 experiments trying to find a physics breakthrough. Most of the time the experiment fails. The rights job is to block the left from doing too much but once an idea appears to be working then they take the position.

Also the right has won before. Neoliberalism was a right wing extremists ideology. It has largely been adopted by the left. The left now has to frame their social spending in neoliberal terms and not as plain redistribution. Student loan forgiveness isn’t just a handout to constituencies but will boost growth by increasing education, spending power, and allowing college students more freedom to pursue their passions.

The left is like a scientist who runs a 1000 experiments trying to find a physics breakthrough. Most of the time the experiment fails. The rights job is to block the left from doing too much but once an idea appears to be working then they take the position.

That's a nice attempt to try to make sure that everyone has their proper place, but, I can't actually endorse this.

I'm not just an admin who signs off on the left's "experiments". I have my own substantive moral view of how the world should work, one that is not merely reducible to "keep things the way they are".

You can still have you own moral view and want to do things on the right. And sometimes we make moves to reverse things.

But I was replying to why the right always loses and for the most part it’s because the primary purpose of right and left is for the right to guide and block the left. And only occassionally allow change.

Right as moderator is certainly a popular idea among among the moderate left. For it to actually work, you need the Right to buy in, though, and I question the degree to which that is sustainable. The problem is that the "experiments" you describe have consequences, and those consequences can be used to draw conclusions on whether continued coexistence is desirable. Choose your experiments poorly enough, and the lab burns down.

For the right to buy in to ‘right as moderator’ entails the left acknowledging that their ideas can sometimes fail for reasons beyond the usual lack of funding complaint, and the right to accept that past ideas they support came from the left.

This is not the political culture we see in the USA.

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