When one group became openly hostile to multiple populations of people based on things like race and sexuality, it's no longer 'voting with your feet', it becomes 'go somewhere they're not gonna shoot my son'
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Yeah this article was interesting, but absolutely drenched in both-sides-ism. "I wanna be able to fly a thin blue line flag" doesn't compare with "I'm LGBTQ and fleeing for my life."
Thin blue line flags and safe places for trans people can not coexist.
This is a good thing. The only way the red states will change is by getting worse and worse. They will have no doctors, teachers, nurses, lawyers, or corporations that will purposefully live or do their work there if they can help it. If you are a woman, a person of color, a migrant, an LGBTQ person, a child, or anything other than an old white man, the red states are no longer safe for you.
I basically refuse to go to most of those states if I can help it. Florida? You couldn't pay me to set foot in that state. I feel they same about Texas and many others.
I want conservatism to thrive. It does have a place in a healthy political system. But, my friends, the conservatives are the moderate Dems now. I don't know what else to call the Republicans, other than fascists or cult members. It is a sickness that any person in their right mind should run as fast as they can from.
The truly upsetting part about this is that there are people that are desperate to leave those fascist states, that can't for a variety of reasons outside their control. I wish things were different. This is just insanity.
Florida Republicans are working reeaally hard to kill their state's entire economy right now. Attacking Disney (the state's biggest employer) and undocumented immigrants (the backbone of the state's agricultural industry and a key part of the labor force for various others such as construction and hospitality), driving away teachers by taking away their right to actually teach, etc.
They don't care.
Drive through WV and let me know how much further it has to fall for them to get it.
Go to full red states and listen to them complain about issues that are 100% state legislature and governor issues. But they find a way to blame Obama, Biden, and still fucking cry about Clinton. Both of the Clintons.
The brainwashing is 100%
I want conservatism to thrive. It does have a place in a healthy political system.
What place is that? Conservatism at it's core is about maintaining the aristocracy/hierarchy. That's what it started as, and it's never wavered from that mission. All of the claims towards 'conserving what is good' or 'fiscal responsibility' or 'protecting individual rights' are just that: claims. They have never acted in ways that would back those claims up unless their actions also helped maintain/promote the aristocracy. The rest is just noise and propaganda designed to make their positions sound palatable.
I don't see any place for that in a healthy political system.
I disagree with you, but respectfully. Conservatism is basically just people who, for a variety of reasons (not all of them bad), generally vote for the status quo. This is human nature. Progressives are willing to push forward but also sometimes without regard to some of the consequences. Also human nature. Some people are bold and some people are timid. Having both around in a balanced way helps us all move forward with careful thought. That system is good overall.
The problem is that conservatives are really moderate democrats now. The modern Republicans are not conservatives. They are fascist cultist morons. I believe I explained myself fairly well in my first post. You might want to read the whole thing next time :)
I disagree that it is "good" overall. Conservative policies have always stood in the way of any movement to treat all people equally because the status quo benefits a sections of the population. Slavery. Racism. Sexism. Etc. None of these needed to be "conserved" and we would be a better society if we had been able to address them sooner. Also, conservative power structures when threatened by progress default to authoritarian in brutal fashion. The Holocaust. The Civil War. The Inquisition. Etc. And this is just in the West.
The modern Republican is not an aberration. It is the final form of Conservatism.
I have seen no proof that the consequences of rampant Progressivism are in any way equal to the horrors of rampant Conservatism. The idea that we need to validate Conservativism to "balance out" Progressivism seems to me to be a dangerous myth that is paid for with the blood of oppressed people.
I have seen no proof that the consequences of rampant Progressivism are in any way equal to the horrors of rampant Conservatism.
There have been many cases in history where the forces in society seeking positive change have caused untold damage to their societies. The French Revolution started out with the oppressed peasantry seeking liberation from a decadent and constrictive nobility, but ended in hundreds of people getting their heads cut off before the pendulum swung back and Napoleon took control, and briefly created one of the biggest empires in European history. Napoleon was less conservative than the Ancien Regime but he certainly wasn't a revolutionary.
Another example is the Bolsheviks, who started out as oppressed workers in Russia who wanted liberation from an exploitative and authoritarian tsar, but as soon as they actually gained power, were usurped by a complete megalomaniac who sent thousands of people to labor camps, destroyed most of Russia's social institutions in order to subsume them into the state, committed numerous genocides (some more direct than others), and destroyed Russia's demographics and long-term economic prosperity with a breakneck-pace industrialization. Joseph Stalin's ideological offshoot, Mao Zedong, also did similarly horrible things in China, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, despite starting out as the leader of a peasant rebellion seeking liberation from literal feudalism.
Apart from the Nazis, who can only debatably be considered "conservative" considering they didn't really wanna conserve much of anything about society, conservative insanity doesn't tend to be anywhere near as destructive to society in the short term as progressive insanity is. Instead, conservative insanity causes society to completely stagnate, remaining behind socially and technologically while other societies rush ahead, as happened to Tsarist Russia.
Seeing all this, you'd have to be either biased or stupid to deny the necessity of conservativism in society. Progress is often necessary, today included in many areas, but society must have a conservative wing to prevent the progressives from changing things which are better off left alone.
Fascists shared many of the goals of the conservatives of their day and they often allied themselves with them by drawing recruits from disaffected conservative ranks, but they presented themselves as holding a more modern ideology, with less focus on things like traditional religion, and sought to radically reshape society through revolutionary action rather than preserve the status quo. Fascism opposed class conflict and the egalitarian and international character of socialism. It strongly opposed liberalism, communism, anarchism, and democratic socialism.
MAGA Republicans today practice Fascism, Donald Trump was a Fascist Conservative by definition. The NAZI Party was a Fascist Party that modern Fascists idolize. That doesn't mean that MAGA Republicans are equal to members of the NAZI Party, they are not. It is better to call them by the type of politics they practice, which is Fascism, a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
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You won't win this argument here though. These people don't know the difference between conservativism and US Republicanism.
I think you bring up very good examples. The communists in China with their cultural revolution is another example of progressive policies gone wrong. Children undergoing sex change operations and later regretting it could possibly be viewed as one in a few decades. (Examples of these do exist and their stories are heartbreaking.)
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This is part of the GOP strategy.
Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri has openly acknowledged that the GOP strategy is to make it so miserable for Democrats in red and purple states that they will move to blue states. That would, in turn, cement Republican power in the White House, Senate and thereby the Supreme Court.
This is only a viable strategy as long as the electoral college exists.
It's not going away.
This argument needs to die. The EC is never going away, so stop pinning various strategies and hopes on it somehow magically disappearing. If people spent 1/2 as much time on actually voting and campaigning for center and left candidates as they do complaining about the EC, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.
I have worked on campaigns and studied politics for years. With the EC, the current SCOTUS, and the voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics of the last few decades , there is no reasonable long-term path to left, or even center, power. People are allowed to complain. People have been organizing, for years. Nothing has worked, and basic human rights are now being violated in ways and for groups that they hadn’t been before. You’re right that with our current governmental structure, the EC isn’t going anywhere. But democracy’s not about elections alone; it’s about the consent of the governed. A whole lot of us don’t consent, and I don’t think the current institutional infrastructure’s going to survive the blast when that pressure gets too high. And if anything (other than a Constitutional Convention based on the same principles as the EC) happens to the current arrangement, the EC goes too. No one in an underrepresented state would willingly accept those conditions.
HALF the population can't be bothered to vote in most elections. The country is being dragged to the Right and has been for years now and election after election a massive percent of the population doesn't seem it is worth going out to the polls. In presidential elections it is higher, but still - there are a LOT and I mean a LOT of elections that could have swung the other way if only a few hundred more people got off their butts and voted. We could have gotten rid of that blowhard Lauren Boebart (however it is spelled) last cycle. She won by only a few hundred votes in an election where less than 60% of the population of that district voted. Apparently Colorado is a mail-in state, so these people didn't even have to go drive anywhere.
The situation is even worse if you look at demographics. No one had more to lose than the youth of this country and their voting numbers are pitiful. What's worse is that they have the numbers to change elections. They are a massive group that at this point in time have more people than the dreaded Boomers. Yet their numbers are abysmal.
So when I hear about people complaining about the EC or gerrymandering or a host of other roadblocked set up by the Right for them to get their way on election day, I just think back that these are mostly just excuses. I am not saying that gerrymandering isn't real - it absolutely is - but even some of the most gerrymandered districts could swing the other way if enough people voted.
If you’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the threat the right poses, and you see structural change is impossible, I sympathize. But blaming people who are struggling for not doing something they see as unlikely to produce positive change and that the state is simultaneously actively making it hard for them to do isn’t helpful. I’ve been politically involved since 2000 (academic study, campaign volunteering/work); Barring major disaster, I’m not seeing voter numbers going up from here significantly without legistative changes. You can yell at clouds all you want, but that’s not the point of leverage you’re looking for.
Making everyone a victim who is on some pre-determined path and they have no control over the things that happen to them is exactly the nonsense that I see the youth are falling for. I see posts by Zoomers all the time that essentially boil down to "we're screwed, so fuck it" or "I give up" or some such. That's not the America that I grew up in and I refuse to buy into this idea that change is impossible. Americans need "tough love" - coddling them in this idea of "IF ONLY so-and-so was different" then we could fix the environment/housing crisis/healthcare. Be the change you want to be. Expecting that it will simply be handled to you leads to this apathy and tuning-out that far too many Americans already fall into.
I don’t think you understand. No one in my position thinks things will he handed to/handled for us. (Your word choice is unclear.). I think we’re on the Titanic and we’ve struck the iceberg, we just haven’t done the horrible dying in the North Atlantic part. And if I wanted boomers who’ve probably studied our political structure less closely, spent less time doing actual campaign work, and seen less of the way things work than I have, telling me I’m entitled, I’d have asked one of those guys who likes talking about millennials like we’re children whose biggest problem is not laying off the avocado toast. “Kids today are weak, entitled whiners playing the victim card, and I know better because I’m older” may pass for discourse some places, but not here.
It won't work for long, since they're making people so poor they can't afford to move.
For real. I live in Texas currently. If I could afford it, I would move tomorrow. This place is Hell, in every sense.
Me too. I'm a clinical social worker here, and so many of my LGBTQ+ patients have been struggling with suicidal ideation with the politics here, especially with the most recent legislative session. I'm gonna stay here as long as possible and vote in every fucking election possible. Lately I've even been voting in the Republican primaries against the extremist candidates. It's so sad, because it wasn't this bad here when I was growing up in the 90s. We even had a Dem governor.
LGBTQ+ patients have been struggling with suicidal ideation with the politics here
This is exactly what Abbott wants. Makes me want to plant more trees.
How “Christian” of him, eh? It’s disgusting. We are human souls who deserve safety and to not live in fear. I have hope that many Gen Z Texans feel disgusted as well, won’t move, and can turn Texas blue. Once more and more are able to vote, we can transform this state. Maybe that is too idealistic, but it keeps me sane while I am unable to move.
The wealthy want us to fight a culture war to distract us from the class war we should be having.
.
The rich waged wars on democracy since the beginning of European colonization in North America. They’ve been winning steadily, with few losses since the beginning of money in society.
In any war the only winner is the rich. If the rich lose, then it's called a revolution instead.
“People want to live where they know their neighbors don’t want to wipe them from the face of the earth. More at 11.”
Exemplified by the fact that we have started having free states again like during the civil war. The Maryland governor has been very clear and direct that the state of Maryland will take in political and social refugees from Florida and Texas. Where transpeople are being forced to die or pretend not to exist in Florida, Maryland is codifying their right to be and live as who they are.
You can't blame lefties and progressives for wanting to escape to freedom when their other option is death or hiding.
There is a real threat of harm to various minority groups living in red states. Hell, there’s a real threat of harm to women who can fall pregnant living in red states. I’d certainly not want to live there if my accidentally falling pregnant (which would likely be ectopic in my case) would result in a very high chance of my death.
Both sides?
I’m sure both sides are actually doing this. It’s just that only one side is actually being persecuted and forced to leave their homes.
Conservatives are going to make it legal to outright murder progressives, so there's definitely safety in living in a blue state
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It would be cool if democrats focused more on working class people, rather than just saying they do. That's literally all they need to do to win back millions of voters.
I totally get your sentiment here, but don't they do this by (at minimum at least) the legislation that they try to put in place? Student Loan forgiveness. Expanding educational opportunities. Access to healthcare. Providing more sustainable and green energy sources. Better pay and protections for working Americans. These initiatives constantly get shot down by the other side, and then people blame Democrats for not forcing it through. As long as we have one side actively torpedoing the other's efforts, we can't put the blame on the people trying to do something. Just my two cents though. Plus you have the uneducated people that align with conservatives that think they are the recipients of their platform's initiatives, when it really goes to the top 1%. So they stay in power to continue the grift.
I wish democrats would make moving to places like Montana, the Dakotas and Wyoming a priority
It's such a weird time in the U.S.. Also, it might be a better choice to go to a battleground state.
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