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

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.

There are very few nazis or white supremacists in the world. But the left thinks there are 80 million of them in just the US alone

i think the number is a bit higher. anyone who says "i'm white" is a white supremacist, as whiteness is an ideology of supremacy over people who are indigenous or black.

that doesn't make them nazis though.

but nazis aren't the only fascists: fascism is an ideology favoring the state above all else, and bringing every institution in line to serve the state. mussolini made the trains run on time, but they trains were run by corporations. now we have airlines that buttigieg is supposed to make run on time. wall street, the pentagon, langley, capital hill, and the whitehouse are all run by fascists, and people vote for them. they support the police that take your guns. they support the politicians who take your rights.

so the usa is a white supremacist, fascist country, and the only people who can see it and want to fight against it are derided as "woke" and "backwards".

i also want to say its great that you read a bit about intersectionality, but maybe you need to read a little more. it's about systems of oppression, and you don't seem to believe those exist.