The Loyal Opposition

[xoxoxoBruce]

I found this to be a good read.

There were, of course, many other culprits in the election’s outcome. Comey, the Kremlin, the cable-news networks that beamed Trump 24/7, Jill Stein, a Clinton campaign that (among other blunders) ignored frantic on-the-ground pleas for help in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the candidate herself have all come in for deserved public flogging. But the attitude among some liberals toward the actual voters who pulled the trigger on Election Day has been more indulgent, equivocal, and forgiving. Perhaps those white voters without a college degree who preferred Trump by 39 percentage points — the most lopsided margin in the sector pollsters define as “white working class” since the 1980 Ronald Reagan landslide — are not “deplorables” who “cling to guns and religion” after all. Perhaps, as Joe Biden enthused, “these are good people, man!” who “aren’t racist” and “aren’t sexist.” Perhaps, as Mark Lilla argued in an influential essay in the New York Times, they were turned off mostly by the Democrats’ identity politics and rightfully felt excluded from Clinton’s stump strategy of name-checking every ethnicity, race, and gender in the party’s coalition except garden-variety whites. Perhaps they should hate us.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I found this to be a good read.

I found *this* to be a similarly good read.

All world views are not inherently equal. Conservative thinking is, by definition, bent on conserving the status quo. It is often regressive. A shrinking, a backward movement, a return to previous points in cultural, political, and intellectual development.

The fact that humanities departments are exceptionally lacking in conservatives and dogmatically religious people highlights this reality. Psychology, poetry, sociology, political science. People who have wrestled with the human condition, the human soul, literature and art, are the least likely to give credence to backwards ideas that are diminishing to human value and human dignity.

[henry quirk]

"Conservative thinking is, by definition, bent on conserving the status quo. It is often regressive. A shrinking, a backward movement, a return to previous points in cultural, political, and intellectual development."

Which is not the worst idea when 'progress' takes you down untenable roads or to repugnant places. Backing up when you've reached a dead end is sensible, yes?

[Beest]

Originally Posted by henry quirk

"Conservative thinking is, by definition, bent on conserving the status quo. It is often regressive. A shrinking, a backward movement, a return to previous points in cultural, political, and intellectual development."

Which is not the worst idea when 'progress' takes you down untenable roads or to repugnant places. Backing up when you've reached a dead end is sensible, yes?

If you're intent is to back up, then to set off in a new direction in search of a better avenue of progress then yes, if you are writing off progress as a failure, and just receding a halt, then maybe not.

IMHO

[henry quirk]

Sometimes there's no 'new direction' or 'better avenue'. Sometimes makin' do with what you got is the best thing to do.

Let's take the ACA as example...

I guess I'm in the minority here, but my health care (when and why I go to the doctor, how often I go, how I pay for it) is my business and no one else's.

All I want from government is final arbitration (not first, not intermediary, final) in disputes between me and the doc (or insurer or hospital), and I want congress (along with cleanly and wholly repealing the ACA) to make it so if I, livin' in LA., find an insurer in Alaska offering what I want, for the price I want, I can transact with that insurer.

Beyond that, the government should be (as it should be on a great many things) silent and neutral.

Repeal, and do not replace (do not seek a 'new direction' or 'better avenue'...just back up).

Instead: we're gonna end up with what we have (or a tweaked, and still crappy, version of it).

Progress, sometimes, ain't.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Henry, I guess this applies to you.

[Beest]

If you believe that what you have is the best that can be, the top of the curve, then travelling in any direction is going to be downhill.

The ideal system that you desire, is not what is and not what was, so you wish to progress to that state of being.

[henry quirk]

What I suggest, to me, isn't progress...it's deregulation.

I make no claim what I suggest is 'better', only that I prefer it.

I have no doubt many of those folks I saw (and heard) in footage from town halls ("without the affordable care act I'd be dead!" "without obamacare my >insert loved one< would be dead!" "without the ACA I [or my >insert loved one<] can't afford life-saving/-enhancing medicine/treatment!") would be truly in the shitter if what I suggest came to pass.

Here's the thing: each and every one of these folks operates out of self-interest, just like me. Explain why I must set aside my priorities in favor of theirs?

Unlike many of the 'hillbillies' in Bruce's piece, I'm not on the dole, am not subsidized, am not beholden (which is to say: I'm not a hypocrite).

I put more in than I take out, I ask for nuthin' except decent roads to drive on and to able to transact with others without jumpin' through hoops. Instead, I have crap roads (which I pay for) and grief tryin' to simply get what I want (my nice little catastrophic insurance, the one declared sub-standard by the ACA).

No, I'm not after 'progress'...I want a retreat from it (the philosophy of it).