Welcome to Earth!
I dunno. All politics is local, right?
Even if you have an anti-abortion husband and wife, if the wife is being forced to go back to work somewhere she thinks is unsafe, does that outweigh her need to vote Republican?
I think this creates a world where Biden gets a ton more 55+ votes than you would normally expect from a Dem.
But itâs not unsafe! Democrats are lying to you about how bad the virus is. Are you going to let a bunch of liberals keep you from earning a paycheck?
MAGA!
Theyâll definitely say that, but by October, when the death toll is over 100k, most people are going to know someone who either died from it or was hit hard by it. On an individual level, other than the true die hards who will believe literally everything, people will know whatâs really going on.
Weâll see, I guess.
My guess is that for those Republicans whose immediate family members or themselves get very sick or die, maybe half switch to dem or donât vote. Thatâs nice, but I donât think itâs going to be a huge impact. But I guess in all the places with a very small margin, itâll do.
You guys are all forgetting the partyâs last and most essential command.
Your first mistake is believing that anti-abortion rhetoric in politics actually has a lot to do with abortion in the first place. I mean the same group that wants to ban abortions fights against pretty much every program and policy we have data elements for that proves a reduction in⌠abortions.
On one of my favorite topics â of how post-Great-Society Republicanism has always been the party of literally evil â one of my favorite writers is Not Having It today.
Trump is a proven liar, but on a grander scale heâs the embodiment of a lie that conservatives have been peddling for decades.
That is because the entire philosophical foundation of conservatism is a template for exploitation. William F. Buckley was a rich asswipe with an affected accent who never had to worry about money a day in his life, and yet he remains a hero of the conservative movement for founding National Review and establishing the credo that the magazine, and the conservative movement as a whole, âstands athwart history, yelling Stop.â It is the stupidest credo ever devised, but it makes perfect sense coming from a man whose life stood to benefit in every way from the preservation of the status quo. And boy, did Buckley benefit. He ran a magazine. He hosted a TV show. He went to fabulous parties. He died with an estate valued in the tens of millions of dollars (FUN FACT: he specifically omitted his illegitimate grandchild by name from that estate, saying in his will that the boy was âpredeceasedâ to him).
Go get 'em, Drew.
The whole situation is basically a scene straight out of Gangs of New York.
Which tracks, I guess, because all of modern conservatism has been about taking America back to the 1850s.
My man.
Todayâs Republican Party is nothing more than a gross celebration of inequality. It is loose collective of yahoos and rich assholes and fringe libertarians and pious hypocrites whose only shared trait is their vindictiveness.
Fuck 'em in the other ear.
And so itâs long past time to stop giving credence to conservatism as a whole, to treat it as the failed intellectual exercise it has proven to be. Look where itâs gotten usâendless war, mass incarceration, mass shootings, mass opioid death, mass inequality, for-profit schools and jails, virtually legalized white collar fraud, open racism, suppressed voting rightsâand tell me itâs worth anything. Tell me this wasnât the PLAN all along, so that the comfortable can remain comfortable.
Mmmmmm.
Liberalism isnât without its faults. But the ideal of a liberal democratic America that features things like, oh, I dunno, free education and free health care, maybe even free housing and a basic guaranteed income? That is not a pipe dream. That is not impractical. That is not a slippery slope to becoming East Germany.
Preach.
In case you needed any evidence that the old GOP is dead and buried. Trump party forever. MAGA.
I know Catholics who voted Trump simply because he is âanti-abortionâ. They claim to despise him otherwise but I actually find them even more intolerable than MAGA crazies who at least have the âcrazyâ part going for them.
Intellectually I have to consider these people fake Christians as they obviously donât value life or compassion otherwise. Quite apart from the abortion reduction programs that should be driven, they just feign helplessness when the GOPâs other programs predictably lead to homelessness, poverty or death.
Todayâs Republican Party is nothing more than a gross celebration of inequality.
But they wonât work if they have those things because they will have no incentive! Especially, you know, if theyâre one of those people who are born in a culture of laziness.
I got to know about Buckley thanks to a podcast on James Baldwin (due to a new translation of one book here). The only good thing I learned about the former is that privileged arguments never really change. Well, I lie, the second good thing is that he helps people in getting to know about Baldwin. l hope he appreciates that while rolling in his grave.
EDIT: added context from a couple posts back.
The sad thing about the GOP - well, one of many - is that the party itself is so terrible that itâs impossible to vote for a GOP candidate who might be slightly less terrible when a more terrible Democrat is running.
A vote for the more terrible Democrat is a vote for the less terrible party. A vote for the less terrible GOP is a vote for the more terrible party. Itâs just hyper-partianship all the way.
This succinctly sums up my extended family and friends that are repub.
I dunno, this strikes me as a circumstance that doesnât come up very often. Itâs quite hard to find a GOP candidate less terrible than her/his opponent.
The ones who die wonât vote for Trump at least.
This is a very accurate description of about half the people in my immediate social circle. Another 10% are simply MAGAssholes, looneys and conspiracy nuts, which leaves about 40% as decent left-leaning folks, probably slightly less given that some people are just politically apathetic anymore after years of burnout.
I am so tired of Conservative Republican friends and coworkers who simply refuse to acknowledge any other aspect of how horrible the GOP has become because in the end, the GOP is still the âSAVE THE BABIESâ party. Iâve argued until I am blue in the face about how we could reduce the demand for abortions by funding education, healthcare and services in communities most at-riskâŚbut preventing the need for abortions is apparently way less sexy than saving babies.
I for one am shocked to see the fact that anti-abortion assholes are driven more by a need to judge morality and punish Others than by a truly noble Life-Uber-Alles first principle to be proven by empirical evidence for the millionth time.