@Finn dAbuzz,
Quote:But I'm not trying to be helpful.
I mean "helpful" in an analytic sense (accurately grasping real-world phenomena). Generalized formulations which refuse to allow for differences commonly obscure far more than illuminate. "All politicians lie" provides no means of properly portraying the profound differences between Nixon and Lincoln.
Quote:the theme of your ongoing narrative has always been and always will be that the right is the source of what ails the US and while the left may need to tweak things around the edges, it's the utterly corrupt right that requires a major overhaul.
That's very close to my argument but with important caveats.
- many modern Republicans/conservatives are not utterly corrupted. I quote some of these voices often and there are many more.
- the Democratic/liberal contingent has its problems/corruptions too (reliance on big money donors, fealty to banks and corporate entities, a propensity of radicals to suppress speech, etc)
There are problems here that are systemic and so effect both parties (the role of money in elections, the clout of big business and their lobbyists, the influence of the war machine, the revolving doors between government office and the Pentagon, the consolidation of media in the hands of five or six huge commercial conglomerates, etc).
But in the present period, it is US conservatism that has become acutely and uniquely radicalized and which has fallen away from principled behaviors. It is an asymmetrical phenomenon. There's a discernible history here and I've written about that before on many occasions. I've cited some of the many studies that track this change (like Hacker and Pierson's Winner Take All Politics or Mann and Ornstein's It's Even Worse Than It Looks). Whether one carbon-dates the beginnings of this shift to Goldwater or to the Powell memo, the move towards this modern extremity is an observable, measurable thing. Nixon started up the EPA and said, famously, "We are Keynsians now". Eisenhower wrote to his brother in '54
Quote:Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.5 Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
