Question From a Liberal: How are We Destroying the USA?

This explains their obsession with guns and personal property, they feel so out of control on big issues, they get hyper vigilant on whatever they can control.

Thank you for the response!

I've thought about this--this oft-commented-upon notion that conservatives want small federal government and more power in the hands of the states and/or people--but I continually find it difficult to square this with what conservatives are voting for today. Trump has been very clear about wanting to consolidate power in his own hands, in a manner consistent with authoritarian dictators, and conservatives don't seem to have a problem with it. Similarly, while the conservative cant about abortion for decades has been that they want it in state control rather than federal, now that SCOTUS has put in state control, conservatives are talking about a federal ban. So, I don't really buy this notion that conservatives favor local/state control over federal; I increasingly think that's a facade for "we don't like people different from us enforcing their views on us," but it covers, "we have specific ways we think people should live and we want to enforce those views on other people." The problem I have with this is that liberal policies don't actually enforce their ways of life on conservatives, with the significant exception that said policies do push to have liberal ways of life promoted in public education, which conservatives obviously have a problem with. However, liberals aren't trying to force anyone to get abortions, simply let people who want them have them. Similarly, no one's trying to force people to be gay or trans; simply accept people who are gay as human beings. I honestly don't know what conservatives think the "gay agenda" is. Can you explain this?

I understand that the allure of an authoritarian government is one that holds to your own policies and tramples any opposition to them--I can understand the appeal of that to anyone, conservative or liberal. But I would think most people are able to wrap their minds around the idea of civil disagreement and the importance of people being able to debate things and vote on them as a group (democracy). I do think the media has overblown the extent to which conservatives think the following, but January 6th really did send the message that Trump supporters don't accept what the rest of us call democracy, and that's a serious problem. Currently, polls indicate most conservatives still support Trump, who is still claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. Why should liberals regard conservatives as reasonable, rational human beings under these circumstances? Why should I respect the opinions of a person who is willing to vote for a transparent psychopath and liar, just because he parrots what the policies they like to hear? Clearly, liberals vote for politicians who have flaws and simply parrot their views, but Trump is beyond the pale, is he not?

This is a lot more helpful than your other comment ITT, which I'm not going to bother responding to.

Right up until the evergreen college strangeness.

I remember that and I agree their behavior was balls-to-the-wall crazy and totally unjustified. Thing is, most liberals who saw that agreed the students were out of line. Just like most conservatives agree the 1/6 crowd were out-of-line. Don't judge an entire half of the political spectrum by their extremists.

Conservatives value freedom and the individual. Liberals have begun to go backwards, treating people as part of social groups.

Liberals value freedom too, don't be daft. No group would admit that they don't value freedom, and virtually all do in some sense. Conservatives grip that liberals are encroaching on people's religious freedoms, while liberals gripe that conservatives stand in the way of freedoms for gay people, women, racial minorities, etc.

As for individualism vs. collectivism, it's not as simple as individualism=good, collectivism=bad. In any functional society, there is always a balance between the freedoms of the individual and and the needs of the group. Supporting one while neglecting the other always leads to societal problems. It's not "backwards" to treat people as parts of social groups—we all are a part of social groups, even as we are distinct individuals as well.

This is where the left really lost someone like me. I was having a conversation about people and individualism with a friend of mine and she said “have you ever heard of intersectionality?” Well, yes of course. But you intersect everyone enough and you’re just left with a perfectly unique human. Skin color, religion, education, preferences, you add them all up and no one is the same as anyone else.

I take issue with intersectionality too, but not for the reason you've given here. I think here you're taking the idea to an extreme it was never meant to be taken to and thus judging it to be absurd when you're the one who's taken it to that absurd end. I don't have a problem with intersectionality as a concept—it's just the idea that people can be given a set of social "coordinates" in society by mapping where they fall on various bipolar axes. There's nothing wrong with that; it's a valid way of looking at subsections of society. The problem I have with it is that most people who talk about intersectionality and use it in political arguments don't use it as a method of analysis but as a method of painting a literal crosshairs on certain demographics to make them the enemy.

So that’s a bit of the social ways that liberals are moving us away from a capitalist democracy.

I think I can comfortably speak for most moderate liberals when I say that we don't want a communist state, wherein the government owns everything and there's only one political party to vote for. However, that doesn't mean that capitalism has no flaws that it can't correct itself. I favor capitalism, regulated by some socialist policies—which, again, I think I can safely say is what most moderate liberals want. Lemmy apparently is a haven for far leftist commies though. Never seen so many of them in one "place," to be honest.

And as far as policy, a lot of liberal solutions to problems is just to throw money at shit. And bloating government to make up more programs to throw money at.

I work in community mental health and service a lot of people on welfare, disability, etc. Having seen how the system works up close, I can certainly agree that there is a lot of wasteful spending and the system overall is very inefficient. However, private charitable organizations have simply failed to help the populations I work with, and in my personal experience, that's partially because a lot of them genuinely don't want to. Churches are often only interested in helping if there's a chance to gain a new convert, and lots of local organizations that focus on their surrounding community only have real interest in helping a specific subgroup within that community, not the community as a whole. So, I don't think the private sector has demonstrated it has the willingness to help everyone, so much as specific groups.

The government is incompetent, and liberals want to keep giving government more control over peoples lives. But the government will never make better decisions for your life than you will.

Yes, but that's not what your tax dollars are actually for. The idea of government charity (welfare) using your tax dollars is that it will at least attempt to take care of people neither you nor the private organizations you favor have any real interest in helping. It's there for the people who are the most in need, with the fewest resources, options, and support. It's in your interest that these people get help, because their poverty and suffering typically leads to crime and other social problems that will affect you down the line in one way or another. I have no real interest in helping criminals, but I acknowledge it's in my interest that criminals do get help in prison, because reformed ex-convicts are less likely to return to a life of crime than unreformed ex-convicts.

The feeling of inevitable violence is because the leftists have decided that anyone who isn’t a leftist is a bigoted nazi. I mean, those are pretty obviously fighting words.

I understand why you say that, but I don't think you're looking at it from the other side as well. Conservatives regularly label anyone who doesn't agree with them as "woke," "Marxist," and allege they "want to destroy the country" too, and yet the vast majority of political violence comes from the Right, not the Left. So, I don't think that really accounts for the violence itself. Sure, those who get violent might cite extremist rhetoric from the opposite side of the political aisle, but every study that really digs deep into these people and their motivations finds they either have serious mental health issues or already adhere to a violent extremist ideology themselves to begin with.

Thanks for your input, I really do appreciate it. If you want to continue discussing these issues, I'm game, just keep your comments of this caliber, please.

I was a lifelong conservative until I developed a chronic illness and realized that conservatives have nothing but cruelty to offer in this regard. It broadened my empathy for others and made me more liberal. For instance when you talk about people failing or succeeding on their own merits, I realize that it is indeed possible for the scales of failure and success to be so drastically skewed so as to almost guarantee a particular result. If one person for example is spending more than half their time managing an illness which creates profound life limitations and another doesn't have to deal with that, who is more likely to find success?

Why then should that person's maximal prosperity be favored over the other person's ability to do anything more than scrape along in poverty? Why shouldn't that person prefer a political philosophy which still treats them like a human being and not simply a loser, a failure or whatever other word one might want to put to it? And to be clear, I've been doing the bootstrap thing for a long time. I've built businesses to try to create opportunities for myself when everything else was closed off. It's not laziness or apathy or anything of the sort. It is however clear to me that conservatives don't think about people in my situation at all and they see me as having no place in society.

The general answer to your question is that Progressivism is designed to destroy the USA by gradually eroding traditional values, and then progressively moving on to erode more. That’s the entire point of Progressivism.

When this country was founded, many people held the values that Black people should be slaves and women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Assuming you don't hold those values, doesn't that go against the idea that all traditional values are good and shouldn't be changed? Furthermore, the Founding Fathers intentionally created ways for laws and even the constitution to be changed, so isn't it fair to say they intended for progressivism to have an avenue to change things? Your answer seems overly generalized. I asked my question operating on the assumption that there were specific fears conservatives have today about how liberals are trying to do things they feel will destroy the country. Do you think you could give me those specifics?